In person icon Political Personalization and Personalized Politics

Outline of the topic A crucial concern in all democratic systems is the linkage between citizens and decision makers. How are interests and attitudes communicated between them, and how are decision-makers held accountable for their actions as representatives? Most scholars agree that political parties are the key unit for establishing this linkage (Dalton, 1985; Dalton, Farrell and McAllister, 2011). However, general societal changes, such as the erosion of the class based society and technological development in communication have changed the role of political parties. Parties have less control over political communications and voting has become less predictable (Dalton 2000: 25-27; Drummond 2006; Hjarvard 2008). This has led scholars as well as parties themselves to reconsider the importance of individual representatives, a topic that was until recently quite neglected due to the focus on parties as unitary actors (Poguntke & Webb 2005; Karvonen 2010; Thomassen & Andeweg 2004: 49). The increased importance of individual politicians at the expense of political groups such as parties has been labelled personalization of politics (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007; Balmas et al. 2014). Political personalization is 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” (Rahat and Sheafer, 2007: 65 for a similar definition see Karvonen, 2010: 4; Mancini and Swanson 1996: 10). Political personalization is a multifaceted phenomenon. Three main types of political personalization can be identified: institutional, media and behavioral personalization. These can be further categorized into sub-types: institutional personalization at the state and at the party level; personalization of mediated (or controlled) or unmediated (or uncontrolled) media; and personalization in the behavior of politicians and voters )Rahat and Sheafer, 2007). Furthermore, personalization may be about focus on leaders (centralized personalization) or about focus on individual politicians beyond party leaders (decentralized personalization (see Balmas et. al. 2014). The term personalized politics describes a static situation that may result from the culmination of the process of personalization or describes the properties of a political system in comparison to another (for example, “politics in the United States is more personalized than in Denmark”). Studies of political personalization have investigated the importance of political leaders and individual candidates for vote choice (see for instance Bittner, 2011; Costa Lobo and Curtice 2015; Garzia, 2014). Other studies focus on how media (controlled and uncontrolled) attention has turned towards individual politicians rather than parties (see for instance Hermans and Vergeer. 2013; Kriesi, 2012; Reinemann & Wilke, 2007; Van Aelst, Shaefer, and Stanyer, 2011; Van Aelst Sheafer, Hube and Papathanassopoulos, 2017). Also, personalization has been studied in relation to the distribution of power within political parties investigating to what extent power centralizes in the hands of the party leadership (Poguntke and Webb, 2005) or decentralizes making individual politicians act more independently of their party (Balmas et al. 2014; Rahat & Shaefer, 2015). Recent studies has also illuminated the institutional aspects of political personalization (Colomer, 2011; Renwick and Pilet, 2016) Personalization of politics and personalized politics may seem to be an obvious result of the weakening links between political parties and society and individuals and the developments in communication techniques (especially the new, unmediated, media). Yet, empirical evidence is scarce and sometimes contradictory (Karvonen, 2010; Adam and Maier, 2010; Van Aelst, Sheafer, and Stanyer, 2011). Moreover, the study of personalization is important for the study of democracy in general because it challenge the key role of political parties and thus the main model of democracy in parliamentary system, that of party democracy (Katz, 1987). However, the conceptual understanding of personalization as well as the theoretical explanations of why and when personalization sets in still need to be developed, and, as noted, the empirical evidence of personalization is still scarce and inconclusive. Therefore, the purpose of this workshop is to bring scholars together that investigates different aspects of personalization and personalized politics, to engage in discussions of how to conceptualize, explain and measure personalization. and exchange theoretical and conceptual ideas as well as empirical results. Relation to existing research If in the past, the study of personalization focused on the United States (Wattenberg, 1991, 1994), over the last decade the research on personalization has spread to additional cases, leading to extensive discussions of how to understand and investigate personalization in parliamentary democracies (See for example: Adam and Meir, 2010; Blondel and Thiebault. 2010; Balmas et. al. 2014; Calise, 2011; Karvonen 2010; McAllister, 2007; Musella, 2015; Rahat and Sheafer, 2007). In addition, some larger research projects such as the PartiRep-project (http://www.partirep.eu/), the Comparative Candidates Survey project ( http://www.comparativecandidates.org/) and RepStyle (http://ps.au.dk/forskning/forskningsprojekter/repstyle/) have ambitiously been developed to advance theoretical frameworks for explaining the role of individual politicians in democratic politics and collect data to investigate it in multiple empirical settings. 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