The Personalization of Democratic Politics and the Challenge for Political Parties

William P. Cross, Richard S. Katz, Scott Pruysers

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785522963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The implications of the personalization of politics are necessarily widespread and can be found across many different aspects of contemporary democracies. Personalization should influence the way campaigns are waged, how voters determine their preferences, how officials (e.g., MPs) and institutions (e.g., legislatures and governments) function, and the place and operations of political parties in democratic life. However, in an effort to quantify the precise degree of personalization over time and to uncover the various causes of personalization, the existing literature has paid little attention to many of the important questions regarding the consequences of personalization. While the chapters throughout this volume certainly document the extent of personalization, they also seek to address some fundamental questions about the nature of personalization, how it is manifested, and its consequences for political parties, governance, representation, and the state of democracy more generally. Indeed, one of the primary objectives of this volume is to speak to a very broad audience about the implications of personalization. Those interested in election campaigns, voting, gender, governance, legislative behaviour, and political parties will all find something of value in the contributions that follow.

Chapter 1

Personalism, Personalization and Party Politics

Scott Pruysers, William P. Cross and Richard S. Katz

This book is about the role and place of individuals—primarily leaders, legislators, candidates and other activists—in modern political life and the implications of this for political parties. Election campaigns, especially in parliamentary democracies, have typically been characterized as contests between competing political parties (Wlezien 2009) because it is parties that aggregate interests, set policy agendas and mobilize voters (King 1969; Dalton, Farrell and McAllister 2011). Moreover, even after the election has been waged, parties remain central players as both legislatures and governments are organized along party lines (Weller 1985). The centrality and importance of political parties is captured in Schattschneider’s (1942, 1) classic argument that ‘political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.’¹ From a theoretical perspective, the primacy of the party as an organization was particularly evident during the time of the mass party.² In the context of deeply rooted historical animosities based on cleavages such as religion, class and region, individual political actors and their personalities were thought to matter very little compared to ideology and party (Mughan 2000).

Despite the centrality of political parties as organizations, however, individual political actors have been, and will always be, crucially important to democratic politics. After all, parties are often considered to be nothing more than collectives of individuals, or ‘teams of men’ as Downs (1957) defined them. Cadre parties, with their loose organizational structure, for example, were built around individuals, and election campaigns tended to highlight individual local notables rather than broad national policy or collective identities (Norris 2000; Katz and Mair 1995). Even the mass party took opportunities to highlight its leader and did not focus solely on the collective identity. As Katz notes in the concluding chapter to this volume, membership applications for the French Communist Party in 1950 included the following oath: ‘I hereby join the party of Maurice Thorez’. Despite having a clearly defined ideology and sense of collective identity, the party was, in many ways, defined by its leader. Moreover, as the deeply rooted cleavages that defined politics for generations waned, Kirchheimer’s (1966) ‘catch-all party’ emerged as an alternative to traditional mass-based politics. The emergence of the catch-all party has transformed party competition and has placed a renewed emphasis on individual political actors, specifically with its de-emphasis of ideology and the strengthening of those at the top of the party leadership.

As ideology and formal group identifications (such as class, union affiliation and so on) continue to fade as the primary mechanisms for organizing civic life (Bennett 2012), Western democracies have experienced a significant decline of partisanship and party identification (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000), increased electoral volatility (Bartolini and Mair 1990; Caramani 2006) and a decline of collective identities more generally (Inglehart 1990; Putnam 2000). Importantly, transformations in social and political attitudes and significant changes in political party organization have been accompanied by dramatic innovations in communications technology such as the widespread adoption of the television, and more recently, the Internet and social media. In many ways, these technological changes have served to reinforce the importance of individual personalities (Hermans and Vergeer 2012; Vergeer, Hermans and Sams 2011) by allowing leaders, individual legislators and even candidates to have a more direct and unmediated relationship with voters (Kruikemeier et al. 2013).

Since the emergence of the catch-all party, scholars have increasingly written about the growing importance of individual political actors, especially party leaders and prime ministers, both during election campaigns and inside of legislatures and governments. Although there is still much debate regarding the precise degree, many students of parties and elections have identified a trend towards more candidate and leader-centred politics (Cross and Blais 2012a; Karlsen and Skogerbø 2015; McAllister 2015; Pruysers and Cross 2016a; Wattenberg 1991; Zittel 2015), increasingly individualized campaigns (Cross and Young 2015; De Winter and Baudewyns 2015; Eder, Jenny and Müller 2015; Zittel and Gschwend 2008) and the growing authority of party leaders and chief executives (Poguntke and Webb 2005; Savoie 1999). All of these trends are part of a broader phenomenon that has been labelled the personalization of politics.

Although there have been sporadic and somewhat piecemeal attempts in the literature to identify the importance of individual actors, what is lacking is a comprehensive assessment of the role of individuals in democratic politics and importantly, the relationship of this with political parties. The presidentialization literature (i.e., Poguntke and Webb 2005), for example, focuses exclusively on party leaders and chief executives, leaving out candidates, Members of Parliament (MPs) and a variety of other party individuals who might also deserve study in the context of individualized and personalized politics. Conflation of presidentialization with personalization, of which the literature is often guilty (see, for example, Lobo 2017), is therefore problematic because it restricts our focus to the ‘top’.

Likewise, the personalization literature (i.e., Karvonen 2010) focuses too heavily on change over time, and in the pursuit of documenting longitudinal changes, we often lose sight of how central and influential individual actors are even in the absence of change. Indeed, a country’s politics may be more personalized than another (meaning that persons are more important in the first than in the second), but it may nonetheless experience less personalization (the importance of persons is increasing more slowly, if at all). In other words, politics can be highly personalized without personalization. This, of course, is a matter of the baseline from which we start measuring and focusing on the ‘-ization’ of personalization means that this distinction typically is lost. Although the debate regarding the personalization of politics is both interesting and important, it is equally important to assess the degree of personalism (i.e., the extent to which politics is personalized).

It is therefore important to take a step back. As a result of the importance of party leaders and chief executives, we are necessarily interested in presidentialization (and the more static presidentialism). Leaders and chief executives, however, are not our only interest. We are also interested in candidates, MPs and party members. Here, the multiple levels identified in the personalization literature is a useful starting point (Balmas et al. 2014), although we identify many more possibilities for personalism than a simple leader-candidate dichotomy. Furthermore, although we are interested in personalization broadly, change over time is not our only interest. Ultimately, we are interested in personalized politics. That is, politics in which individual political actors are centrally important, prominent and highly visible. One of the arguments of this collection is that contemporary democratic politics includes a significant degree of personalism. In some respects this might result from recent changes (i.e., personalization), whereas in others it may have been the case for decades or longer.

As students of political parties, however, it is the interaction between personalism/personalization and party politics that is our central interest. Both personalized politics and the personalization of politics have important, though largely undocumented, implications for the way democratic politics is practised and the relative role, function and organization of political parties. Accordingly, we are particularly interested in how the various types and degrees of personalism/personalization interact with, and perhaps influence, party behaviour and organization. Simply put, we seek to uncover the implications of personalization on political parties and consider how personalism influences the ‘partyness’ of both party and government.

As we will see, the very definition of personalization sets it up as something that occurs at the expense of the party and therefore is a phenomenon that weakens the party. As Katz argues in his contribution, in some manifestations this is clearly the case when party primacy, cohesion and unity are undermined by the prominence and visibility of individual actors (be they leaders, legislators, candidates, etc.). Although focus on a single, paramount leader may not always challenge the cohesion and coherence of a party, intraparty competition to become or to replace that leader may put cohesion and coherence in jeopardy, as may the prominence of individual personalities in positions below the top. It may also mean that what the party stands for can change, perhaps dramatically, depending on who is steering the ship. All of this suggests that high levels of personalism and processes of personalization may represent an important challenge to political parties as they are conventionally conceived.

Although this may be the case, we are equally interested in how parties react to personalism and how it influences their organization and behaviour. It may not weaken them as much as encourage—or force in some instances—change in organization, practice/strategy and internal power distribution. Thus, on the other hand, personalization may simply represent an opportunity for the party to rebrand itself, the ability to ride the coattails of a star candidate or popular leader or the possibility of local candidates putting a ‘human’ face on the distant and impersonal party machine. In this sense, personalism can be a strategic decision of the political party and not something that simply happens to it.

In examining personalization through the lens of party politics, the chapters that follow demonstrate that personalism and personalization are not inherently zero-sum games for political parties. Although these processes certainly have the ability to undermine party cohesion (both during campaigns and inside legislatures) and challenge the primacy of parties, personalization also provides parties with opportunities to connect and engage with party members and voters and to highlight the strengths of their unique ‘team’ (i.e., individual candidates and leaders). Importantly, however, the relationship and dynamics among person, party and personalism are not the same in every case or consistent over time. Some candidates, for instance, may engage in personalized campaigning in such a way as to undermine the coherence of their party’s message, and others in the same party may wage a personalized campaign that is nonetheless consistent with the party’s overall message and brand. Likewise, the degree of personalism may change both over time and among different parties in the same country. In better understanding how, when and the extent to which personalization, and personalism more generally, occurs we contribute to a more complete picture of party organization and party government.

Personalization and Personalized Politics

The question of ‘what is personalization’ is both straightforward and multifaceted. At the most basic level, personalization refers to changing electoral, societal and political norms in which the centrality of individual actors has increased. Rahat and Sheafer (2007, 65), for example, define personalization as ‘a process in which the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (i.e., political party) declines’. Karvonen (2010, 4) sums up the basic premise as follows:

The core of the personalisation hypothesis is the notion that individual political actors have become more prominent at the expense of parties and collective identities. The central concept denotes a process of change over time: at t politics was less personalised than at t+1.

Personalism is personalization without the longitudinal change. It denotes the current state of personalized politics and refers to the role and prominence of individual political actors, regardless of change over time. Although the personalization literature focuses on change over time (i.e., personalization as a ‘process’ rather than a ‘state’), many authors have noted that personalized politics is not an entirely new phenomenon. Indeed, Weber’s classic form of ‘charismatic authority’, for example, emphasized how individual leaders could derive personal authority from their charisma.³ More recently, Bennett (2012, 22) has written that ‘personalized politics has long existed, of course, in the form of populist uprisings or emotional bonds with charismatic leaders’. Similarly, Holtz-Bacha and colleagues (2014, 154) have argued that ‘in many ways, the personalization of politics is as old and ubiquitous as politics itself’, and Karvonen (2010, 2) writes that ‘while most authors would argue that the personalisation of politics is a typical feature of contemporary democracies, the phenomenon itself is anything but new’.

Persons always have been important in politics because ultimately they are the only ones capable of seeking political office and of governing. One of the attributes of any politician in a modern democracy is his or her party. But, of course, individuals differ within the same party with regard to: (a) their competence; (b) their policy preferences; (c) their moral character; (d) their personability or sex appeal, and so on. Personalization occurs, for instance, when citizens, voters, the media and political actors themselves place greater emphasis on these personal differences. Suffice it to say, forms of personalism have likely existed for as long as politicians have. The important distinction here, however, is the (potentially) increasing importance of individual actors over time or, at very least, the particular importance that these actors have in contemporary democratic politics.

Beyond this basic definition, however, there is little consensus on the issue of personalization, either conceptually or empirically. Take, for example, the degree of personalization that can be found in western democracies. McAllister (2015, 337) has written that ‘there is little doubt that national election campaigns in the established democracies have become more personalized. Leaders are much more prominent now than in the past, and considerable popular attention is directed towards the personalities of the leaders’. Elsewhere, McAllister (2007, 571) has written that ‘in a trend that is shared by all of the liberal democracies, politics has become increasingly personalized’. Others, however, are less convinced. Kriesi (2012, 825), for example, claims that ‘the empirical evidence concerning the “personalization of politics” thesis is, at best, mixed’. Kriesi concludes that rather than finding evidence of increasing personalization, what can be found are ‘large country-specific differences in the overall degree of personalization and of the concentration of attention on the top candidates’.

This tension is borne out empirically as well. Wauters et al. (2016, 3), for instance, reviewed forty articles regarding the personalization of politics and found no clear evidence in either direction. In fact, the studies were almost evenly divided between those supporting personalization (eighteen studies) and those finding no or mixed evidence of personalization (twenty-two studies). Likewise, Karvonen’s (2010) large-scale analysis of personalization produced mixed results. Although certain dimensions, such as media attention, provide strong evidence of personalization, evidence relating to the importance of party leaders and individual candidates in vote choice, as well as the changing dynamics of parliamentary democracy, are less clear. Indeed, Karvonen (2010, 101) concludes that the analysis ‘does not support the notion that there has been a clear and pervasive trend towards personalisation among parliamentary democracies’. We add to this debate by providing new empirical evidence of the personalization of politics (or lack thereof) in a number of parliamentary democracies.

Holtz-Bacha and colleagues (2014, 155) suggest that much of the inconclusive and contradictory findings in the literature are the result of ‘a lack of clarity and agreement about the definition of the term’. This is echoed by Van Aelst, Sheafer and Stanyer (2012, 204) who write that ‘it is the lack of conceptual clarity and the absence of common operationalizations which are an important cause of the unclear or conflicting conclusions’. Some studies explore personalization in the media, others consider local campaigns and others still examine voters and how they cast their ballots on election day. Additionally, different institutional settings, different temporal periods of study and baselines and different countries/parties may all contribute to the mixed findings. Indeed, it has been suggested that ‘it would be a mistake to assume either that personalization has developed linearly, or that all countries would experience the phenomenon identically’ (Holtz-Bacha, Langer, and Merkle 2014, 154). It is therefore unsurprising that different, and often contradictory, conclusions a...