Personnel, Institutions, and Power: Revisiting the Concept of Political Personalization

Evidence points to an increasing personalisation of political power by chief executives (CEs) in recent years. It is often argued that such personalisation contributes to the current trend of autocratisation and the global decline of democracy. Yet, our understanding of the degree and kind remain fractured, not least because there is a plethora of tacit understandings, definitions, and concepts of what political personalisation is. While many argue that personalisation relates to the rising dominance of the CE over other political actors, there is much disagreement over who these actors are. Moreover, while personalisation can occur in both autocracies and democracies, scholarship is still siloed into regime types. Addressing these gaps, we develop a framework that defines personalisation as a process in which the CE centralises power to make political decisions by weakening the constraining capacities of all relevant actors during stages of the policy process. We propose that CEs can achieve this through three distinct strategies – personnel management, institutional engineering, and power arrogation. We demonstrate the usefulness of our conceptual framework with illustrations from democracies and autocracies of the Global South.