Personalization of Politics and Leadership Stability in Western Europe

One of the main consequences of the spread of the catch-all/electoral-professional party model among political parties in Western Europe was the decrease in the level of influence of party members and intermediate party structures in favour of party leaders. One of the driving forces of this process was the tendency to personalize politics, centralizing campaigns and communications around the figure of the top candidates and leaving ideologies and other faces of the party in the background. While plenty research has focused on analyzing the increase of personalization of politics around Western Europe, the link of personalization and leadership stability stills remains underexplored empirically. If personalization of politics strengthens the level of leader control over the party organization, for instance by controlling the candidate selection procedures or the dominant coalition within the party, we could expect an increase in the stability of leaderships across Western Europe. Using novel data from the expert survey PoPES in combination with the COSPAL dataset we perform a comparative study of the main political parties in Western Europe democracies, to assess the impact of the personalization of politics on leadership stability.