Party or Populist Leader? Personalization in Central Europe - From Politics as Usual to COVID-19 Crisis

A significant feature of contemporary politics in democratic societies is the need to create feedback between the ruling elite and the public, i.e. functioning political communication between citizens and politicians. Public perception of politics and satisfaction with it today depend to a large extent on the way in which its outputs are channelled towards citizens, and therefore voters. This principle was further strengthened and became decisive after the onset of the covid-19 crisis. The degree of identification and confidence in the leader's competencies may significantly have influenced the ability to contain the pandemic and affect the public's willingness to comply with anti-epidemic measures. In this light, the phenomenon of personalization of politics can be considered a modern trend of political communication, in which politicians (as individuals) become more important actors than political parties and organizations themselves (Kaase 1994, McAllister 2007, Bittner 2011). More specifically, the concept of personalization could be understood as “a process in which the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (political party) declines” (Karvonen 2010, Van Aelst, Sheafer and Stanyer 2012, Garzia 2014, Rahat and Zamir 2018, Rahat and Kenig 2018 etc.). In our paper we will focus on research into the patterns of personalized politics and populist leaders’ effect in the democracies of Central Europe – namely the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary during the last decade from 2010 to 2021. The comparative analysis will be concentrated on leaders in government and their party platforms. The main goal of our paper is twofold: The first objective is the analysis of the behavioural personalization (Rahat and Sheafer 2007), i.e. the extent to which voters consider allocation of votes based on the leader rather than political party (Kriesi 2011, Karvonen 2010, Adam and Maier 2010, Curtice and Holmberg 2005). The second objective concentrates on identification of possible shifts in voters’ attitudes towards the leaders during the COVID-19 crisis. Our paper will answer a set of the following research questions: 1. Is the voters’ party choice more influenced by the attitudes towards the leader or the attitudes towards the party? 2. What trends can we observe in the behavioural personalization in selected CE countries in the last decade? What effects had the COVID-19 crisis on the popularity of leaders and the political confidence of voters towards the leaders? Do the populist leaders benefit from the current crisis, i.e. do we observe a higher level of political support of populist leaders during the crisis? These research questions will be answered on the bases of post-election surveys – Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and national longitudinal data.