Which democracy do political parties want? The role of party personalism

The standard model of representative democracy is increasingly challenged. Partly because of the tight historical and theoretical connection between representative democracy and political parties, it is not well understood how the latter relate to other models of democracy. Whereas previous studies have examined ideology and populism to explain why parties differ in the conceptions of democracy they advance, we argue that personalism, as expressed in party organization, is part of the story. Combining data from PPDB and V-Party, we analyze the relationship between party personalism and opposing models of democracy for 194 parties from 38 countries. Centralized personalism goes together with supporting direct democracy, illiberalism, and majoritarianism. In contrast, parties exhibiting a high degree of decentralized personalism tend towards liberalism and consensus democracy. When the “rules of the game” are not universally accepted anymore, we need to understand better which players seek to make changes and why.