Although personalization is often assumed to be a core trend in contemporary politics, scholars are highly divided on this topic. Personalization is a multi-dimensional phenomenon encompassing institutional (changes in rules), media (changes in representation of politics) and behavioral (changes in behavior of politicians or voters) aspects (Balmas et al, 2014). Personalization tendencies of one type do not necessarily imply nor exclude the presence of personalization of another type. It is therefore essential to make clear distinctions.
Most research attention on the last form of personalization (i.e. behavioral) has been given to party and government leaders (Pilet & Cross, 2014; Poguntke & Webb, 2007) and to the electorate (Marsh, 2007; Wauters et al, 2016). Parliaments, however, have only occasionally been the research topic. The few studies that exist on personalization of parliamentary behavior focus on one single country, use ad hoc indicators and/or analyse only one point in time (Balmas et al 2014; Baumann, Debus, & Müller, 2015; Helboe Pedersen, 2015; Rahat & Sheafer, 2007; Louwerse & Otjes, 2016).
The aim of this paper is to develop a number of indicators of personalized parliamentary behaviour which can be used in cross-country research. We argue that personalized parliamentary behaviour refers to changes in persons (who acts?) and acts (what kind of acts are undertaken, and how?). The former refers to changes in the kind of actors that play a prominent role in e.g. parliamentary debates (party leaders versus backbenchers), while the latter refers to MPs acting apart from, or even against the party (e.g. by initiating more private members bills, or by stressing individual actors rather than parties in debates).
The development of this conceptual framework will be complemented with empirically testing some of the indicators on a new, original dataset of parliamentary activity in the Belgian House of Representatives (1991-now).
