Many believe that politics in Western democracies has become personalized: individual politicians becoming more prominent at the expense of political parties. This paper seeks to answer whether the shifts in focus from parties to individual politicians, affect all politicians equally or whether some politicians benefit more than others do. Here, the concept of elitization is introduced to the literature on personalization of politics. This concept suggests that elite candidates have been favoured disproportionally. The elitization hypothesis is tested in the case of preference voting for three major parties in the Netherlands between 1971 and 2012. In previous literature, Dutch preference voting has been regarded as an instance of decentralized personalization. However, this paper finds no decentralized personalization, but support for the elitization hypothesis. These results suggest that studies of personalization of politics ought to examine elitization concurrently, where the elitization hypothesis can be both a competing and a complementary hypothesis to the personalization hypothesis.
