Personal Parties in Parliamentary Democracies: Emergence, Evolution and Effects”

In recent decades, personal parties – i.e., parties where the organization is a vehicle for the personal success of the leader – have mushroomed around the globe. These parties are characterized by a strong centralization of power in the hands of their leaders. While scholarship has mostly studied them in opposition to traditional party models, their spread across countries prompt party scholars to investigate the conditions under which they develop and their consequences for democratic governance. Against this background, this paper suggests shifting from a static (i.e., concept-centered) perspective to a dynamic approach in the analysis of personal parties. In particular, it sets a new research agenda, by reviewing the state of the art about their emergence, their evolution, and their effects. For each aspect, the paper introduces a set of conjectures and indicators, as bricks of an integrated framework for the future study of party personalism in parliamentary democracies.