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Does Personality Really go a Long Way? The Determinants of the Personalisation of Politics in Western Europe (1985-2016)

Comparative Politics
Media
Political Leadership
Quantitative
Party Systems
Bruno Marino
Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies, University of Padova
Bruno Marino
Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies, University of Padova
Nicola Martocchia Diodati
Scuola Normale Superiore
Luca Verzichelli
Università degli Studi di Siena

Abstract

Many scholars have been investigating the personalisation of politics in the past few decades, especially in the Western European context. This phenomenon has been analysed from several perspectives, but very few of them have investigated its determinants, even if the personalisation of politics is a process that might be related to more general – and very significant – changes, be them societal, media-related, or political ones. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by proposing a novel framework to explain the evolution of the personalisation of politics in Western Europe between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s. We depart from data collected in the first expert survey on the personalisation of politics, which has allowed to systematically gather information on this phenomenon for 17 Western European countries between 1985 and 2016. We investigate the effect of different sets of possible determinants: media and societal changes (e.g., decrease in cleavages’ strength, or changes in the structure of media systems, and so forth); institutional factors (e.g., features of electoral systems, or governmental settings, and the like); political and party-system-related variables (the structure of party competition, the impact of specific parties or party systems’ peculiarities); party-related changes (e.g., changes in parties’ membership figures). By means of regression analyses, we test whether the abovementioned determinants have contributed – and to what extent – to shape the Western European personalisation of politics in the past few decades.