Leaders' Effect on Partisanship Attachment in Central and Eastern Europe

Party leaders’ impact on vote is widely analyzed among scholars. Despite this great interest, personalization of politics has been tested in a limited geographical zone, namely the Western Democracies (Midto 1996, Garzia 2013, Karvoren 2012) and the Southern Europe young democracies (Dinas 2008, Lobo 2006, Lisi 2013). No works has measured yet the “leader’s effect” in the young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the strength of “leader’s effect” on partisanship attachment in Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Slovakia. The main hypothesis argues that the nature of partisanship in CEE countries is more influenced by “leader’s effect” than other determinants, such as socio-demographic and structural variables, performance oriented factors and left-right placement. Based on data available on Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems, this hypothesis will be tested through a logit regression.