From Personalization to Autocratization? Executive Power Dynamics Across Political Regimes

Recent global political events point to political leaders increasingly personalizing political power while systematically undermining institutional checks and balances. This phenomenon is linked to autocratization, but the relationship between the two processes remains underexplored across regimes and regions. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for the personalization of executive power (PEXP), which we define as a process in which the chief executive’s ability to influence political decisions increases at the expense of other political actors. We operationalize this concept and explore its distinction from autocratization with a dual empirical strategy. First, we construct the PEXP_vdem index using Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) variables, enabling us to systematically compare it with existing democracy indices (Electoral Democracy Index and Liberal Democracy Index). With this, we capture the nuanced dimensions of personalization and autocratization, stressing that the main difference is in the dimension of power affected by this process. Second, we present an original dataset of PEXP events collected across 32 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022) to illustrate the dynamics of PEXP and its association with EDI. Overall, we found PEXP to be widespread across regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many chief executives bypassed institutional checks to consolidate power during these critical years, but this personalized decision-making did not always autocratize the regime. We explain this finding in detail through paired comparisons looking at cases that recorded high versus low PEXP during autocratization, democratization and regime stability. This finding establishes PEXP as a distinct dimension of political regimes, seemingly autonomous from autocratization.