Partisan dealignment and the personalisation of politics in West European parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Abstract

Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as one of the main drivers of the ‘personalisation of politics’. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such an increase is due to dealignment. This article explores the longitudinal relationship between partisan dealignment, leader effects and party choice, through a novel dataset pooling 109 national election surveys collected in 14 Western European parliamentary democracies across the last six decades. The results show that leader effects increased over time as a function of the decline of party identification. Additional panel evidence from selected countries shows that partisan dealignment is responsible for increasing leader effects on party choice at the individual level. The longitudinal dimension of this study contributes to the most contested aspect of the personalisation of politics debate.