The personalization of party politics in Western Europe (1985–2016): evidence from an expert survey

The personalization of politics has been extensively studied from diferent angles and in diferent national contexts. Nonetheless, an easily comparable and longitudinal study of the personalization of politics at both the country and the party levels is still missing. In this article, we fll this gap by presenting data from an expert survey on the personalization of politics for around 110 parties and a series of Western European countries from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s. The dimensions analyzed concern the impact of the personalization of politics in general elections, and also party leaders’ room for maneuver in candidate selection, the defnition of the party’s policy-making agenda, and party leaders’ intra-party control. Diferent reliability tests confrm the goodness of the data collected. At the same time, frst descriptive analyses show that there has not been a homogenous difusion of this phenomenon in Western Europe, and diverging personalization trends are present for diferent groups of countries or diferent dimensions of this phenomenon.