What Drives the Impact of Personalization in Western Europe?

The personalisation of politics has been widely studied in the past few decades, especially in Western Europe, from several viewpoints, from the electoral to the party-centered one, from the governmental to the media-related one. Nonetheless, very few contributions have focused on the determinants of personalization, even if this latter process might be linked to more general – and much relevant –societal, institutional, or party-related phenomena. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a novel framework to explain the evolution of the impact of the personalization of politics – i.e., the fact that personalization has had a stronger or weaker influence – in Western Europe between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. We depart from cross-time and cross-country data collected in the first expert survey on the personalization of politics (the PoPES) and investigate the effect of three sets of possible determinants: societal changes (the decrease in the strength of the class cleavage or the diffusion of TV), institutional factors (the presence of presidential elections or personal-vote-driving electoral systems’ features), and party-related changes (the organizational decline of Western European parties). Regression analyses show that almost none of these determinants have influenced personalization's impact in Western Europe.