Party Leadership and Personalization in Western Europe: New Trends or More of the Same?

Party leaders constitute a central node in the democratic representation chain. They have also allegedly reinforced their power and autonomy, especially within parties. Moreover, the literature has been increasingly focusing on some leaders' personality traits, such as charisma. This paper explores Western European party leaders' power, autonomy, and personality traits by presenting the first data extracted from the second wave of the Personalisation of Politics Expert Survey (PoPES), tackling the 2017-2023 period and investigating the role of party leaders in more than 130 parties coming from 17 Western European parties. The dimensions we investigate include leaders’ autonomy or power in candidate selection, electoral campaigns, intra-party organizational control, the definition of parties’ policy-making agenda, and government formation. Moreover, we also explore party leaders’ main personality traits (such as pragmatism, individualism, and charisma). The main Research Questions we address are as follows: what is the state-of-the-art picture of personalized party leadership in Western Europe? Are there relevant differences across countries in some analytical dimensions? Is it possible to retrieve consistent patterns of personalized leadership in the main party families or by comparing populist and non-populist parties? Finally, we also sketch some future research paths that could depart from the new PoPES data.