The Popularity Factor: A Comparative Investigation of Demand-Side Behavioral Personalization

Conventional wisdom is parliamentary elections have become more personalized. The idea of “leader-centeredness” pervades electoral politics, with leaders supposed to have a critical impact on election performance and popular leaders anticipated to yield significant electoral dividends, perhaps even more than party evaluations. While scholars agree leaders can and do matter to the vote, deliberations continue regarding the manifestation and extent of these effects. Using an original dataset inspired by popularity measures from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project and incorporating data from up to 87 elections in 30 polities, this article provides the first consistent aggregate quantification of demand-side behavioral personalization, disentangling the distinct and mutual influences of leader and party popularity to the extent possible. It finds that a leader’s popularity directly correlates with party vote share and the likelihood of winning office, evidence of demand-side behavioral personalization. However, the effect of leader popularity on its own is consistently less potent than that of party popularity, providing an imperative nuance to the narrative regarding demand-side behavioral personalization.