Collegial versus personal political parties

After briefly presenting a classification of collegial and personal parties, this chapter outlines three useful indices of centralized personalism in parties at the country level. They examine (1) the formal power of the party leaders, based on the codification of party regulations; (2) an estimation of the centrality of the party leaders in their parties, based on an expert survey; and (3) an estimation of the centrality of the ruling party leader, based on a codification of historical narratives. The chapter ends with a demonstration of the validity and usefulness of these indices. It presents bivariate analyses (1) of the relationships between levels of party personalism in democracies and government system types - identifying less personalism in parliamentary systems, though the difference is highly significant and quite strong only regarding ruling party personalism, and (2) of the relationships between levels of party personalism in democracies and various democrtaic aspects (age group, quality of the democracy, democratic culture). All correlations for all indices are moderate and significant: older democracies (first and second wave), more liberal and free democracies, and democracies with a strong democratic political culture are found to have less personal parties.