Investigating the Relationship between Personalisation of Voting Behaviour and Electoral Volatility in Europe: A Cross-National Analysis

In the last decades, the personalization of voting behavior and electoral volatility have become two of the most investigated phenomena in political science. This considerable attention is the corollary of debates on the well documented erosion of social cleavages (Franklin et al., 2009), the weakening of party affiliation (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2002; Mair et al.,2004; Schmitt and Holmberg, 1998) and the dealignment of the electorate. Although some authors suggested the existence of a strong relationship between personalization and volatility, just few case-studies have empirically questioned the link connecting these two phenomena (Brettschneider and Gabriel, 2002, Karvonen, 2011). This paper aims at providing a more comprehensive perspective, by proposing a cross-national analysis which includes the established democracies of Western Europe, as well as the young democracies of Southern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe. We hypothesize that voters whose electoral decision is strongly influenced by leader evaluation are more volatile than those who manly rely on partisan cues when making their choice. The stronger the impact of the leader evaluation on voting behavior, the higher will be the probability of party switching. Using data from the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems (Module 3 and 4), we will assess the predictive power of the leader evaluation as source of volatile behavior in 23 countries in the last decade. In addition, we argue that some specific macro and micro factors can strengthen or weaken the intensity of the relationship between personalization and volatility: the electoral system, the existence of preferential voting, the degree of party system polarization, the effective number of parties and voters’ socio-demographic characteristics. Specific attention will be devoted to identifying distinct trends between the three European regions exhibiting different degree of party system institutionalization: Western, Southern and Central and Eastern Europe.