The personalization of politics is generally said to undermine political representation, provide a breeding ground for populist leadership, and to produce political instability. Yet despite having extremely personalized and informal politics, small states (they have populations of 1 million or less) maintain much more democratic and stable political regimes than larger states. In this paper, we address this paradox by looking at the ways in which smallness and informal, personalized politics have influenced democratic governance in small states. Building on our field research in various small states around the globe, we offer a comparative analysis of personalized politics in African, Caribbean, European, and Pacific cases, and analyze how personalization and informal politics have impacted democratic transition and consolidation. In doing so, we highlight that personalized politics in small states has some overlapping, but also some divergent features when compared to the dominant use of the concept in larger countries. In particular, we explore the implications of direct, face-to-face contacts between citizens and politicians, and the effects of such linkage mechanisms on political representation.
Our analysis reveals that in small states, personalization offers mixed blessings for democratic governance. On the positive side, direct contact between citizens and politicians means that citizens are less detached from politics, and have greater access to their political leaders. In similar fashion, politicians are generally more aware of the demands and opinions of their constituents. On the other hand, we find that personalization provides a tendency towards: 1) power concentration; 2) clientelistic linkages between voters and politicians, and 3) a high level of polarization. Since small states can be regarded as prototypical cases of political personalization, we end by highlighting the implications of our analysis for contemporary debates about personalized politics in larger countries.
