Personalization of the elections and election campaigns in the Czech Republic

The personalization of politics is characterized as a process, in which individual politicians become more important political actors than political parties. In it most general form it is perceived as a “popular focus on leaders” (Mc Allister 2007). More specifically, personalization of politics refers to a change in the criteria for the evaluations of politicians. This narrower perspective assumes to stress non-political personality qualities instead of professional competence (so called media privatization). However, personalization in its different forms is supposed to take place in three interconnected fields: election campaigns, media reporting and voting behaviour (Brettschneider 2002). In our paper, we analyse the concept of personalization in the context of Czech politics and we particularly focus on personalization, how it was demonstrated in the Czech legislative elections 2006, 2010 and 2013. These elections is important to follow, while during this period the party system and the voting support for traditional parties have undergone a fundamental change. Our analysis is based on survey data and content analysis of pre-election media. We compare the results from three General elections and their campaigns and on the basis of post-election surveys we try to answer the question, whether the voting behaviour of Czech voters is determined by party leader sympathy or simply by party sympathy as a whole. We also aim to test the correlation between the intensity of personalization of the elections and the voting support of new unestablished political parties.