Rethinking the Personalist Regime: Political Personalism and Personalization as A New Approach to Study Regime Changes

In the study of non-democratic politics, scholars often categorize countries into different regimes based on the nature of the ruling group, such as one-party systems, military governments, monarchies, and personalist regimes. This typology helps us understand the diversity of authoritarian politics, but it hinders comparisons across different regimes. Due to the unique internal ecosystems of various ruling groups, previous comparative studies of non-democratic regimes often focused on a few countries with similar systems, such as communist regimes or monarchies. The lack of exhaustive comparisons undermined our understanding of non-democratic regimes, where the majority of the world’s population still lives. Therefore, how can we establish a more inclusive typology to conduct large-N analyses that can more effectively explore political change within authoritarian systems, and even regime change of democratic regression towards authoritarianism? Scholars traditionally believe that in personalist regimes, political power is highly centralized in the hands of the dictator; in such systems, the dictator himself is the so-called ruling group. Personalist rulers not only have diverse political backgrounds but also vastly different personalities and patron-client networks. Therefore, the uniqueness of the personalist regime is stronger, and research on it tends to focus on single case studies with few comparisons with other countries. This uniqueness also marginalized research on personalist rules in political science. However, throughout human political history, many philosophers have used personalism as a primary perspective for analyzing political systems. For example, Plato and Machiavelli preferred the rule of virtuous kings over other regime types. Aristotle categorized political regimes according to the number of rulers: those ruled by one, by a few people, and by many (democracy). In recent years, scholars have observed an increase in personalized politics in democracies. They propose a new concept of personalization: personalization of politics refers to a situation in which individual actors become more significant relative to the broader political collectives. This concept broadens personalism. Personalism is no longer focused solely on centralized personalist rule; it can also exhibit decentralized characteristics, such as collegialism among a few leaders or decentralized patterns among many politicians. This concept can also be applied to analyze non-democratic regimes. If we view all power struggles within non-democratic regimes as contests between one or more individual leaders versus the political collectives, then we can transcend the barriers between different ruling groups and comprehend authoritarianism as a dynamic process of alternating between personalization and depersonalization. Based on their varying degrees of personalism, we can also develop a new typology of non-democratic regimes. In this way, political personalism is no longer confined to one-man rule personalist regimes but is widely present in all regimes, including democracies. We can thus find a new approach to the study of regime change between authoritarianism and democracy.