Over the last decades, the "personalization of politics" has turned into one of the defining elements of the democratic process. However, the common wisdom that sees popular political leaders as a fundamental electoral asset for their own parties finds only limited support in the existing voting literature. So far, comparative electoral research has proven hesitant in systematically addressing the impact of leaders on voting across time and space. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to empirically assess the extent to which voters’ evaluations of political leaders have come to affect their party choice in a longitudinal, large-N perspective. We take advantage of the CSES Integrated Module Dataset, which covers over 50 countries for a period spanning three decades (1995-2015). Its world-wide dimension will allow for an extensive testing of the institutional, contextual and technological factors mediating short term leader effects on vote choice across time and space. We will also tackle the media¬ting role exerted by the struc¬tural characteristics of the political parties (age, size, party family) and the socio-political characteristics of the voters (age, gender, education level, interest in politics, strength of party identification). A systematic analysis of the dynamics of personalization at the micro-level will provide insights into which segments of the electorate are more prone to base their vote choices on personality evaluations, focusing on parti¬cular on the relationship between cognitive mobilization and the mag¬ni¬tude of leader effects on vote choice. The results will improve our under¬stan¬ding of democratic elections in times characterized by partisan dealignment, high volatility and widespread rise of populist forces across the globe.
