This paper investigates the link between centralized personalization and decentralized personalization in the context of flexible list systems (more specifically in the Netherlands and Belgium), and the effect the option to cast a list-vote has on this link. Previous research has shown that leaders of political parties might ‘pull’ voters towards their party or ‘push’ voters to another party, depending on how the leaders are evaluated by the voters. This paper investigates whether such push and pull factors also play a role in the intra-party competition. The results presented in the paper show that negative evaluations of a party leader might result in an increase of decentralized personalization. If intra-party preference voting is allowed and the voter evaluates the party leader more negatively a voter is more likely to cast a vote for another candidate than the party leader. However, this is only true if the electoral system forces the voter to vote for a specific candidate, like in the Netherlands. If the voter has the option to cast a list-vote, like in Belgium, evaluations of the party leader do not influence voting for other candidates. Thus, the absence of a list vote might force voters to cast a preference vote, negatively motivated by the evaluation of the leader of the party. This influences how we should look at preference votes for other candidates than the party leader in systems without a list-vote. In the Netherlands for example, these votes are normally considered to be pure preference votes for the candidate. This paper shows that this is not always true by looking at negative motivations for preference voting.
