The Personalisation of Executive Power: Concept, Index and Comparative Analysis

Personalisation of politics is one of the most relevant political phenomena of our time. After the decline of traditional party government, a radical shift from collective to individual actors and institutions has occurred in several political systems. Political leaders have gained centrality on the democratic scene as a consequence of both a more direct, sometimes plebiscitary, relationship with citizens, and a stronger grip over the governmental action. As regards governmental processes, a tendency may be clearly noticed in leading presidents and prime ministers to control the legislative processes by also elaborating new ways of autonomous decree-making. At the same time, collective bodies such as parties and parliaments become more and more individualized. The concept of monocratic government has been defined to portray such a general framework, as a result of three interrelated phenomena: a) the development of a direct—not mediated by parties and often emotional—relationship between the leader and individualistic masses, so that the former assumes the role of a political representative “above the party”; b) the affirmation of a monocratic principle of political action, so that the leader tends to become the true dominus of party organization and controls governmental activities as well c) a process of increasing fragmentation of collective actors traditionally deputed to control and counterbalance the power of political leaders, such as parliament and political parties (Musella, 2022). Although large comparative evidence has seemed to prove such trends, and the idea of personalization of power seems now widely accepted, the academic enterprise has not yet well disentangled this transformation over time and offered precise operationalizations and measurements. This is a particularly challenging task in parliamentary democracies, where the move towards a presidentialised working mode has made the measurement of prime ministerial power increasingly problematic (Heffernan 2013), even given that this process does not necessarily involve a formal change in the constitutional charter. Consequently, the conceptualisation, measurement, and evaluation of the personalisation of government continue to pose a complex analytical challenge. Focusing on personalization of the executive power, this paper first reviews the benefits and limits of the way the executive power has been operationalised for analysis in current literature. Second, it critically discusses the most diffuse indexes of executive power in parliamentary democracies, by highlighting the main elements that weaken their strength and validity for cross-institutional analysis. In particular, it observes that the existing literature tends to focus on de jure (formal) powers and rarely includes de facto (informal) prerogatives, and that existing indexes do not provide adequate measures to compare the expansion of the role of government over time. Third, the article proposes a new Index that reflects the idea that the personalisation of government cannot be properly understood and interpreted without taking into account the ability of the executive to use powers effectively in the context where it operates. Finally, by examining a number of European parliamentary democracies, the article demonstrates the usefulness of this Index for studying the personalisation of executive power and its patterns in different institutional and political contexts.