Individualism and Political Personalism

Individualization and political personalization are often treated as parallel shifts toward greater emphasis on individual actors and weaker collective structures. The conventional view is that cultural change from collectivism toward individualism drives the personalization of politics, weakening parties and institutions. This implies that cultural change toward individualism also paves the way for populism, personalist rule, and eventually democratic backsliding. This paper challenges that assumption by analyzing the relationship between cultural orientations and political personalism across countries. Drawing on multiple indicators of personalism, partyness, individualism, and collectivism, we show that the association between individualism and personalism is negative rather than positive, across regime types. This relationship persists when controlling for GDP per capita, regime type, population size, and regional context, and remains robust when the cultural dimension of collectivism is included in the models. Contrary to common intuition, we argue that individualism’s emphasis on equality, autonomy, and dispersed authority constrains the consolidation of personal power, fostering more institutionalized leadership and reducing the likelihood of personalist rule. Collectivism, on the other hand, exposes citizens to the influence of non-democratic authorities and enables the consolidation of personal, unconstrained power.