Is Political Personalization Implicitly Reflected in Research Literature? A Content Analysis of Fifty Years of Research of Israeli Elections

Research focusing on political personalization, save for a few notable exceptions (e.g., Duverger, Wattenberg), has become prominent only in the last 15 years. Our research aims to explore whether expressions of this process were hidden in the text of research literature, in the way that researchers described and analyzed politics. That is whether, over the years, they increasingly referred to politics as inter-personal rather than intraparty and interparty cooperation and competition. Recent research on Israeli politics found that over the previous 50 years, the Israeli polity was transformed from a "party-state" to a highly personalized polity. Our analysis focuses on the book series the Election in Israel. It is a book series that, since 1969, has covered all Israeli elections. Each book is an edited volume that contains chapters that relate to various aspects of the elections. It represents how elections - a central event in a democracy -- were perceived by researchers in the last 55 years. We will conduct a quantitative content analysis identifying political personalization and its levels (centralized and decentralized). Preliminary results indicate that the book content does not express the overall personalization process but identifies a sharp increase in centralized personalization and a sharp decrease in decentralized personalization. In addition, as expected, high levels of centralized personalization were evident with the adoption of the direct elections for the Prime minister in 1996 and 1999 and a steep decline with its abolishment.