Party Decline and Political Personalization

A long tradition in political science, that can be linked to Weber’s typology of types of political authority, is to see organizational authority and personal authority as distinct categories with substantially different properties. Following the logic of this tradition, in order to survive and strive, even groups that are established by an individual entrepreneur, such as entrepreneurial issue parties, need to transform from a personalized project into a collective stable organization (Harmel and Svasand, 1993). In our paper, we will revisit the relationship between the two, expecting, following the logic of this tradition, to find strong relationship between party decline and political personalization. That is, personalization brings de-institutionalization because it dismantles the collective organization into its basic components -- the individuals. The paper will start with a discussion of the theoretical relationship between party decline and political personalization. The main arguments will be that first, party decline does not necessarily imply political personalization because other organization may take over some of the functions that were previously performed by the parties. Second, that political personalization necessarily implies party decline because it is exactly about replacing impersonal rules with a personal rule. The paper will then turn to analyze the relationships between party decline and political personalization at the country level. We will attempt to examine whether (and identify which) indications for party decline strongly correlate with indicators for political personalization.