Deinstitutionalizing Power of Decision-Making Personalization: The Paradigmatic Case of the Serbian Communist-Successor Party

Irrespective of their power capacity, parties in newly created democratic systems regularly serve as ‘little more than the personal mobilization instruments for ambitious politicians’ (Randall and Svasand, 2002: 19). In the longer run and without effective routinisation such personalistic leadership is likely to seriously inhibit the party’s institutional development (Ibid). Therefore, for successful research on party organizations in countries without a longer tradition of political pluralism, the knowledge about the structure of their power is absolutely crucial. Nonetheless, when assessing the organizational power of political parties – generally considered one of the basic indicators of their institutionalization – scholars (Basedau and Stroh, 2008; Casal Bertoa, 2011; Yardımcı-Geyikci, 2013) tend to ignore the structure and take the amount of power as the only analytically relevant category. Consequently, most of their institutionalization measurements are either irrelevant for (e.g. party age) or often inapplicable (e.g. number of party leadership alterations) to the study of political parties’ development in newly established multi-party systems. We believe that in this particular political context party institutionalization primarily relates to the process through which a party organization acquires political influence irrespective of its leader’s. Accordingly, we further argue that in order to determine the level of institutionalization of a party organization, one needs to determine the level of personalization of the decision-making power within its ranks. We propose the level of decision-making power personalization to be assessed against two indicators: the frequency and scope of changes in the personal composition of party leadership and central bodies, and the popular perception of a party organization. Finally, we examine in-depth the late 1980s/early 1990s transformation of the Serbian League of Communists into the Socialist Party of Serbia to demonstrate detrimental effect on this party organization’s institutionalization of the nationalism-driven personalistic leadership of Slobodan Milošević.