Synthesis Paper

The personalization of politics in Western democracies: Causes and consequences on leader–follower relationships

Diego Garzia Centre for the Study of Political Change, Universita di Siena, Via Mattioli 10, 53100 Siena, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Available online 24 May 2011 The article provides an assessment of the most recent literature on political leadership by focusing on its effects on voters' cognition and behavior, in the light of the ongoing personalization of politics. The changing role of political leaders in contemporary democracies is assessed through a perspective aimed at linking leadership theory and political science. One of the major consequences of the personalization of politics seems to lie in the changing expectations of voters with respect to the personal profile of their leaders. This is due to the lowering effects of television and parallel attempts by leaders to appeal voters on the basis of perceived similarities. As to the leaders' effect on individual voting behavior, we highlight the various reasons that can enhance (or constrain) the role of party leaders' image in the voting calculus. Implications and directions for further research are discussed in the concluding section.

© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Party identification Personalization of politics Political marketing Leaders' personality traits Leader effects

1. Introduction

The field of contemporary “personality and politics” analysis (Greenstein, 1969) traces its origins back to Harold Laswell's (1930) Psychopathology and Politics, in which the categories of psychology are applied for the first time to the study of political personality. Of particular interest to this early literature is the effect of psychopathology on political behavior. Good examples of the sort are George and George's (1956) analysis of Colonel Edward House's influence on Woodrow Wilson, and the various studies of the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), whose main focus was on Nazism and the psychological characteristics of its leaders. Within political science, the best illustration of this approach is James David Barber's (1977) classification of character structures of the American presidents. Despite many attempts, however, none of these studies has been able to link systematically a specific personality trait or characteristic to the emergence of a successful and effective leadership.

The lack of necessary evidence to trace a profile of the leader for all seasons led the research back to Max Weber's (1922) concept of charismatic leadership, which, according to the German sociologist, can exist only as long as it is recognized by followers. This renewed attention to the environmental conditions that facilitate (or constrain) the emergence of a political leadership (Blondel, 1987) gave impetus to a different line of research based on transactional models (Hollander, 1992). In this perspective, the processes of interpersonal influence are not to be interpreted in virtue of objective characteristics of the situation, but instead on the basis of the respective perceptions and expectations of leaders and followers. According to this approach, the crucial requirement for a political leader is not that of effectively possessing certain personal attributes — quite to the contrary, the task is to let followers believe it.

The Leadership Quarterly 22 (2011) 697–709

E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 I would like to thank Jean Blondel for his encouraging feedback to an early version of this paper, and Paolo Bellucci for his insightful suggestions. I would also

like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Michael Mumford and two anonymous referees.

1048-9843/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.05.010

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This task has become even more important in recent times in the light of the ongoing process of personalization of politics in Western democracies. Leaders have in fact gained center stage with respect to political communication due to the intertwined effect of technological innovations in the media and organizational change within their own parties. This has made in turn political leaders increasingly visible, and therefore subject to constant scrutiny by the public. One of the major consequences of the process lies in the changing ways in which followers (e.g., voters) perceive and evaluate their leaders. As we shall see, media's ubiquitous focus on individual leaders – and on leaders as individuals – have in fact provided the public with the chance to judge them as persons, thus allowing the application of cognitive frameworks usually employed in everyday life to the process of leader appraisal. As a result, there has been a shift from an idealized conception of political leaders to one in which attention is paid first and foremost to the leaders' ability to identify with their own public. In this sense, a symbolic closeness to the masses has become a necessary condition for emergence and electoral success of a political leadership.

Another key consequence of the personalization of politics lies indeed in the growing impact of leaders' personality on individuals' vote behavior. The decline of social and partisan alignments occurred in almost every advanced industrial democracy during the last decades has in fact made way for short-term forces (e.g., candidates, issues, performance evaluations) to influence voting choices to a greater extent than it was the case three or four decades ago — this influence being more pronounced in presidential systems than in parliamentary ones. Once again, the role of technological innovations and party change emerges as crucial in the process — the latter being responsible of an increased personalization of the political and electoral supply, as presented and further amplified by the former.

This article is structured as follows: we begin by analyzing the changing content of contemporary political leadership due to the process of personalization common to all advanced industrial democracies (Section 2); then, we will discuss its major effects on voters' political cognition (Section 3) and behavior (Section 4) in turn; implications and directions for further research will be discussed in the concluding section.

2. The personalization of politics

In the last half century, there is little doubt that political leaders have increasingly gained importance to both political communication and electoral competition vis-à-vis their parties in almost every Western democracy. Impressionistic evidence of this trend include the substitution of leader images for party symbols during election campaigns (McAllister, 1996); the media's increasing propensity to mention candidates rather than the parties they belong to (Dalton, McAllister, & Wattenberg, 2000); and the tendency to portray executives in a personalized fashion — these being routinely labeled after the name of their leaders (Bean & Mughan, 1989). Hypothetically, this should have made in turn more relevant “the role of individual politicians and of politicians as individuals in determining how people view politics and how they express their political preferences” (Karvonen, 2010: 1–2).

In 1991, Martin Wattenberg announced the beginning of a new era in politics, referring to it as candidate-centered politics (Wattenberg, 1991). His longitudinal analysis of U.S. presidential elections held between 1952 and 1988 supported empirically the impressionistic evidence, by highlighting a major shift in the electorate's attention from political parties and issues to specific political, and particularly presidential, candidates. Such shift is accompanied by a greater importance of their personal characteristics, as opposed to more political ones, in the eyes of voters.

In the last decade, a growing number of studies have concentrated on the increasingly tighter relationship between politicians' personality and the functioning of representative democracy, and in particular on the process of personalization of politics (Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004; Karvonen, 2010; McAllister, 2007; Rahat & Shaefer, 2007). According to Rahat and Shaefer (2007), the personalization of politics should be seen as “a process in which the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (i.e., political party) declines” (Rahat & Shaefer, 2007: 65). Similarly, Karvonen puts at the core of his personalization hypothesis the notion that “individual political actors have become more prominent at the expense of parties and collective identities” (Karvonen, 2010: 4).

Generally speaking, the personalization of politics could be seen as part of a more widespread process of individualization of social life (Bauman, 2001), on the basis of which people tend to perceive themselves and others first and foremost as individuals rather than as representatives of collectivities and groups. However, a number of more specific causes have been advanced for increasing personalization in the political process, from both macro-institutional (e.g., institutional arrangements, electoral laws) and micro-behavioral (e.g., distrust in representative institutions) perspectives (for a review, see: McAllister, 2007). Here, we will concentrate on what the present literature regards as the two most crucial causes of the process: (i) the changing structure of political communication due to the emergence of television; and (ii) the parallel erosion of traditional cleavage politics. Already in 1960, Edwin C. Hargrove observed that:

“as the old politics of class and ideological conflict declines in Europe, as television becomes the chief means of political information for the public…power will increasingly become visible to people through popular leaders and these leaders will be the chief means of engaging the political interest of publics” (cited in Poguntke & Webb, 2005: 21).

Fifty years after these ‘prophetic’ words, few would cast doubts over the crucial role exerted by electronic media, and television in particular, in the personalization of contemporary politics. The changing structure of mass communications has been central in emphasizing the role of political leaders at the expense of parties, making the latter “more dependent in their communications with voters on the essentially visual and personality-based medium of television” (Mughan, 2000: 129). As explained by Davis (1990),

698 D. Garzia / The Leadership Quarterly 22 (2011) 697–709

“[a]verage news consumers prefer to read about other people, not about abstract groups or remote bureaucracies and government agencies. To cater to these preferences, news stories, especially those that appear on television, are routinely framed from the point of view of central actors. News consumers see an individual in action and are given information about his or her feelings and reactions. Personal motives and mistakes are analyzed. Inevitably, stories about groups are transformed into stories about group leaders” (Davis, 1990: 169).

Personalization has been defined as “the more general, pervasive, and fundamental element in the process of change of electoral campaigns” (Swanson & Mancini, 1996). An indication of the profound impact of television on political leadership comes from the increasing importance gained by televised leaders' debates during national election campaigns. Began as a peculiar feature of presidential campaigns in the U.S. (e.g., the historical Kennedy vs. Nixon debates in 1960), the leaders' debate spread quickly all around the Western world. On forty-five democracies examined in the mid-1990s, only four did not feature a leaders' debate (LeDuc, Niemi, & Norris, 1996).

On these premises, it is tempting to see television as the prime mover behind the personalization of politics (McAllister, 2007). Yet it must not be overlooked the key role played by political parties themselves in the process. In the last decades, parties have undergone deep transformations which are at once cause and consequence of personalization. The widespread erosion of social and partisan loyalties encountered in almost every advanced industrial democracy (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000; Franklin, Mackie, & Valen, 1992) made necessary for class-mass parties to readapt in order to extend their electoral basin beyond the social class to which they usually referred to. This process of transformation into catch-all parties (Kirchheimer, 1966) implies the declining role of ideology at the expense of features more appealing to voters such as the personality of the party leader (Farrell, 1996). In a comparative study of campaign practices among European and Australasian parties in the late 1980s, Bowler and Farrell (1992) argue that in the bulk of cases there was clear evidence of a shift toward party leaders during electoral campaigns.

Following this argument, it is organizational changes within parties to ‘blame’ for having ignited the process of personalization (Rahat & Shaefer, 2007), while others (e.g., Katz & Mair, 1994) argue in favor of the thesis by which it is television to have affected the nature of party organizations. However, individuating the prime mover behind the personalization of politics lies beyond the scope of this article. As a point of departure for our discussion, we will rest on the assumption that personalization is due to the interplay of technological innovations and changes in party structures (see Fig. 1).

According to this interpretation, the remainder of this article will be devoted to the effects of personalization on citizens' perception of political leaders (Section 3) and the ways in which this eventually affects their behavior as voters (Section 4).

3. Voters' perception of leaders' personality

How information are mentally processed is the core business of cognitive psychologists. Yet the process of impression formation (Funk, 1996) is one that pertains closely to the study of political leadership as well. When trying to grasp the basis on which political leaders are evaluated by followers–voters, the researcher is always faced with the usual dilemma: do individuals perceive the world the way it is (e.g., realist approach), or do they create a subjective representation of it in their mind (e.g., constructivist approach)? According to cognitive realism, the cognition of surrounding physical and social reality occurs directly. There is no use

Organizational Change of Parties

Technological Innovations

PERSONALIZATION OF POLITICS

Behavioral EffectsCognitive Effects

Fig. 1. Causes and consequences of the personalization of politics.

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of mediating cognitive structures, and thus perceived objects appear in one's mind as they really are (Gibson, 1966). On the contrary, cognitive constructivism maintains that the process of understating reality occurs through the construction of certain mental images resulting from interpretation and inference of the received stimulation (Neisser, 1967).

Evidently, a transactional approach to the study of political leadership requires by necessity the employment of a constructivist perspective. According to perceptual-balance theory, the image of a politician should be defined as the voter's perception “based on both the subjective knowledge possessed…and the messages projected by the candidates” (Nimmo & Savage, 1976: 8). In a more thorough definition, Cwalina, Falkowski, and Newman (2008) argue that

“[t]he term candidate image means creating a particular type of representation for a particular purpose (e.g., voting), which, by evoking associations, provides the object with additional values…The values through which the constructed object is enriched may never be reflected in his or her ‘real’ features — it is enough if they have a certain meaning for the receiver” (Cwalina et al., 2008: 19, emphasis added).

In this sense, the image of a candidate is essentially ‘in the eyes of the beholder’ and thus voter-driven rather than candidate- driven (Hacker, 2004). Incidentally, it may well coincide with the projected image, but what really matters is the way in which it is perceived by voters.

3.1. The image of the leader as a sum of traits

The number of aspects of a leader's personality on which voters can base their evaluation is extremely vast, in principle. The early literature – as carefully reviewed by Bass (1981) – found more than forty personal (e.g., physical and psychological) characteristics associated in a way or another with a successful political leadership. However empirical analyses have shown that voters develop a mental image of political leaders as persons on the basis of a restricted number of categories. According to Caprara and Zimbardo (2004), “[s]uch simplified perceptions of the personalities of political leaders may derive from a cognitively efficient strategy that voters adopt to cope with the massive amount of daily information to which they are exposed” (585).

In this respect, leaders' personality traits have been found to play a crucial role in organizing knowledge and guiding voters' processes of leader perception (Funk, 1999; Pierce, 1993). Traits are in fact “a basic component of our images of other persons of all kinds whether family member, acquaintance, or public figure” (Funk, 1996: 98). Psychologists define personality traits as habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion (Kassin, 2003). According to this perspective, traits are (i) relatively stable over time, (ii) different among individuals, and (iii) they influence behavior (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003). Therefore candidates' personality traits are of crucial importance to voters, for they offer an appealing shortcut to infer what sort of leader that candidate will eventually be.

A number of empirical studies have shown that the kind of traits used to evaluate political figures are rather limited in number and tend to fall into a few broad categories. The first systematic effort in this direction is Miller and Miller's (1976) analysis of open-ended responses on candidate likes and dislikes in the American National Election Study (ANES) surveys. By means of factor analysis, the authors reduced the thirty-four separate characteristics mentioned in the 1972 survey for each of the presidential candidates into five basic dimensions, which the authors label as: competence (highest factor loadings: experience and ability); trust (honesty and integrity); reliability (responsibility, decisiveness and stability); leadership appeal (inspiring, communicative, warm and likable); and personal appearance (age, health and other demographic features). Ten years after, a longitudinal study covering all the U.S. presidential elections held between 1952 and 1984 finds that a five-dimensional solution provides once again the best fit to the data, thus reinforcing the conclusion that “people think about presidential candidates in terms of a limited number of broad categories rather than in terms of a multitude of discrete traits” (Miller, Wattenberg, & Malanchuk, 1986: 528).

A different, more straightforward approach consists in asking respondents to evaluate presidential candidates on a finite number of trait terms (close-ended response categories). It is the case of Kinder (1986), who developed the categories employed in the ANES series since the 1980s: namely, competence (subsuming qualities such as intelligent and knowledgeable), leadership (inspiring and providing a strong leadership), integrity (moral and honest) and empathy (compassionate and caring). Confirmation for the appropriateness of the categories chosen by Kinder comes from a comparative analysis by Pancer, Brown, and Barr (1999), whose research demonstrates that both in Britain, Canada, and the United States the dimensions of judgment with reference to political leaders are relatively few in number, and that “a common set of traits robustly summarizes the bases for political judgment” (Pancer et al., 1999: 362).

3.2. The ‘ideal’ leader

In the 1960s, an important stream of empirical research began investigating which of these traits is most important for an ideal political leader. According to the data collected by Sigel (1964), around 80% of the American electorate considered honesty as the most essential characteristic for a president. Two decades later, a group of American scholars demonstrated that, in the eyes of voters, a presidential prototype should be first and foremost honest — this answer being provided by more than 90% of the respondents (Kinder, Peters, Abelson, & Fiske, 1980). Not dissimilar data is presented in the more recent literature dealing with both established and newer parliamentary democracies, such as Australia (McAllister, 2000), Germany (Brettschneider & Gabriel, 2002), Italy (Barisione, 2006), Poland and Romania (Cwalina et al., 2008).

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From a normative point of view, voters' perception of the leader as an honest and trustworthy person would thus seem a necessary condition for electoral success. The reason is clear: politicians do in fact their job in a place and manner that are, for the wide majority of voters, hard to observe and difficult to interpret correctly. Because of these conditions, it is to be hoped that voters will take into account those personal characteristics related to the chances that such politician will act, when in office, in an honest and disinterested manner (McCurley & Mondak, 1995). It is nothing more than the basilar Burkean assumption of representative democracy: namely, that of voters looking for “representatives whom [they] can trust” (Mondak, 1995: 1045). Yet, as explained by Kinder et al. (1980),

“[i]t is one thing to demonstrate that people possess prototypic conceptions of an ideal president. It is quite another to show that the elements of character and performance citizens emphasize in their thinking about an ideal president carry special weight in their preferences toward real presidential contenders” (Kinder et al., 1980: 321).

As underlined by Rokeach (1973), and in the face of this apparent primacy of moral values, U.S. presidential elections seem to demonstrate quite another thing. In 1972 for example, the winning candidate (e.g., Richard Nixon) succeeded in spite of the widespread perception of his dishonesty. Similar conclusions are reached by studies conducted in two European parliamentary democracies: Germany (Brettschneider & Gabriel, 2002) and Italy (Barisione, 2006). In two pre-electoral surveys conducted in these countries (the German in 1997, the Italian in 2001) a wide majority of the sample regarded honesty as the characteristic to possess. Nonetheless, the winners in the subsequent elections were respectively Gerard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi — both candidates scoring lower than their counterpart in terms of perceived honesty.

3.3. Disentangling the real and the ideal: the ‘everyman’ leader

A tentative explanation for this discrepancy between the public's idealized conception of a political leader and the actual characteristics of elected politicians draws on Nisbett and Wilson's (1977) argument. In telling us about an ideal president, the authors argue, respondents rely primarily upon the cultural mythology of the presidency. In other words, a conception of the ideal president reveals what the culture honors, not what voters consult in their judgment of a real candidate. As made clear in the previous section, the ubiquitous focus on individual leaders by contemporary mass media (and television in particular) has moved the public's attention from their role of politicians to that of persons. The power of television to restructure the social space is a recurring theme in sociology of communication (Thompson, 1995). Meyrowitz (1985) describe accurately the relationship between television and political leaders, and in particular what he calls the lowering effect of the former on the latter. Through television we see “too much” of our politicians; as “the camera minimizes the distance between audience and performer…it lowers politicians to the level of their audience” (Meyrowitz, 1985: 271), thus stripping them of the aura of greatness that characterizes any ideal conception of a political leader. From here the paradox of candidates for the presidential nomination competing to look as unpresidential as possible, and of presidential (or prime ministerial) candidates chosen on the basis of their communicational, expressive, and relational capacities — qualities defined by Greenstein (2001) as ‘proficiency as public communicator’ and ‘emotional intelligence’. In this sense, leaders like Bill Clinton, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, and Nicolas Sarkozy stand as paradigmatic examples.

The possibility that voters' evaluative criteria with respect to their leaders have been affected by the changing ways in which these are presented in the media is widely corroborated by empirical evidence. According to Rahn, Aldrich, Borgida, and Sullivan (1990), people have come to evaluate politicians in the same way they evaluate ordinary people, because relying on the personality of a candidate (as opposed to his ideology, or issue positioning, and in virtue of its increased visibility) allows individuals to apply inferential strategies that are constantly employed in everyday life. In this way, voters are able to arrive at an overall judgment of a certain politician without exerting the effort to monitor everything he says or does. A suggestive hypothesis is that advanced by Sullivan, Aldrich, Borgida, and Rahn (1990), whose analysis explores the possibility that voters “make their comparative candidate judgments within the context of their perceptions of everyday people” (Sullivan et al., 1990: 463). It is the authors' assumption that “voters' belief about human nature might provide a normative baseline against which candidates can be measured” (ibid., 464). If voters do make use of their intuitions about human nature when they compare presidential candidates, they might do so in different ways. On the one hand, they could apply an expectation that candidates should be supermen: that is, men whose honesty, strength and competence rise above the limitations imposed upon them by human nature. On the other hand, voters could use their assumptions about human nature to support candidates who best typify their conception of the average human being: an everyman whose personal attributes score relatively close to their own. Sullivan and colleagues tested these models in the context of the 1984 U.S. presidential election, in which the incumbent Ronald Reagan was challenged by Democratic nominee Walter Mondale. As they found out, a wide majority of voters tended to evaluate Reagan within the everyman framework — people liked him and supported him because he was perceived as good as the majority of ordinary Americans. On the contrary, Mondale was measured against the more demanding superman prototype. If he came out well in the comparison, voters would have voted for him. However, “such a situation occurred quite rarely, and Reagan won the elections” (Cwalina et al., 2008: 41).

3.4. Leader–voters similarities in the age of manufactured images

The above discussion has led us to a crucial aspect of contemporary leadership. It is in fact becoming commonplace for political leaders to draw their authority “not by being beyond people”, but “by being of and like them” (Renshon, 1995: 201). In an

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evocatively titled essay on the Reagan presidency, D'Souza (1997) showed How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, arguing – in line with the empirical findings of Sullivan et al. (1990) – that the key of his success lied exactly in his (appearing?) ordinariness. As president he demonstrated extraordinary abilities in identifying with his own public (Campus, 2007). In this respect, Ronald Reagan was among the first politicians to fully understand the emergent demand of identification between leaders and followers in contemporary democracies (Mény & Surel, 1999). What matters the most, his presidency gave birth to a tendency now widespread among political leaders: namely, that of trying to appear, for as much as possible, as an ordinary Joe. Paradigmatic in this respect is the case of Bill Clinton's diminished presidencies of the 1990 s, in which, according to Denton (2005), the distance between the president and the public ‘evaporated’ perhaps forever.

Indeed, it would seem that the leader's symbolic closeness to the masses has become a crucial requirement of modern democratic leadership (Barisione, 2009a). Why should this be the case? According to some, this requirement “entails the image of a candidate who the people feel is able to listen and understand, on the basis of a similarity that is perceived as the promise of trustworthy and responsive leadership” (ibid., 48). The perceived leader–voters similarity lies thus at the core of contemporary electorates' search for leaders able to ‘stand for them’ — this being a crucial feature in the theory of symbolic representation (Pitkin 1967).

A substantial amount of research in the field of personality psychology has already corroborated the hypothesis that individuals are most attracted to others who they perceive as similar to themselves (Byrne 1971; Newcomb 1961). More recently, the similarity-attraction paradigm has been applied by Caprara and Zimbardo (2004) to the study of political behavior. Their empirical model of leader–voters congruency moves from the assumption that

“[w]e want to trust competent leaders, but we also want to like them personally, and this is easier when they are perceived as essentially similar to us. The extent to which voters perceive their leaders' personalities as similar to their own is critical in humanizing abstract icons and endorsing politicians' efforts and claims” (Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004: 590).

As the authors find out, people tend to like better those politicians whose personality traits match more closely their own traits. But to what extent this leader is in fact similar, as a person, to those voters attracted by him on the basis of perceived congruency? Although an unequivocal answer lies beyond the scope of this article, the question brings nonetheless our attention to the ways in which politicians attempt to manipulate the public's perception of their personality, and in particular to the role played by professionals from the field of political marketing (e.g., image crafters, campaign consultants, and so on) in the packaging of candidates according to the desires of voters.

Nowadays, it is routinely argued that “winning parliamentary or presidential elections without marketing is nearly impossible” (Cwalina et al., 2008: 1). The widespread diffusion of marketing techniques as applied to political campaigns has led Bruce Newman to announce the entrance of politics in the age of manufactured images (Newman, 1999). In this perspective the political spectacle consists, first and foremost, in the construction of leadership (Edelman, 1988). Pre-campaign market research (e.g., opinion polls, focus groups) helps to understand “what type of leadership is most in demand by those segments of the electorate that are also potential constituencies” (Campus, 2010: 4). Once their image is packaged according to the demands of voters, politicians are eventually sold on the (electoral) market by means of advertisement; empirical research on political advertisement has demonstrated its strong impact on voters' perceptions of the candidates (Kaid & Chanslor, 1995; Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 1995).

It would thus seem that the crucial task of an aspirant political leader in contemporary democracies has become that of shaping (or better, having shaped) his image in a way that appeals to the largest possible number of voters (Louw, 2005). Huge efforts, in terms of time and money, are invested in the process of image crafting. Such an emphasis on the right image represents a clear hint of politicians' expectation that their image matters to voters. But is it really the case? Are voters increasingly basing their vote choice on a comparative evaluation of the personality of the candidates, as they perceive it? To these questions is devoted the next section of this article.

4. Leader effects on voters' behavior

Voting on the basis of personality has often been seen as ‘irrational’ (Converse, 1964), for the popular cynical view of candidates is that “they are affectively packaged commodities devised by image makers who manipulate the public's perceptions by emphasizing traits with special appeal to the voters” (Dalton & Wattenberg, 1993: 208). As Carmines and Stimson (1980) have put it: “[t]he common – indeed, universal – view has been that voting choices based on policy concerns are superior to those based on party loyalty or candidate images. Only the former represent clearly sophisticated behavior” (Carmines & Stimson, 1980: 79). Recently, however, a very different approach has emerged. According to some, gathering information about party leaders is part of a rational voting strategy (Bean, 1993; Ohr & Oscarsson, 2003; Page, 1978). As said above, voters tend to evaluate party leaders on the basis of a finite number of categories (e.g., integrity, reliability, and competence) and such evaluative criteria appear as “hardly irrational” (Dalton & Wattenberg, 1993: 209). Quite to the contrary, it seems that “candidate assessments actually concentrate on instrumental concerns about the manner in which a candidate would conduct governmental affairs” (Miller et al., 1986: 536). Empirical research demonstrates that the impact of leaders' personality is directly proportional to the level of political sophistication of who evaluates it (Glass, 1985). Moreover, the best educated citizens emerge as the most likely to be concerned with the personality traits of leaders when choosing who to vote for (Kroh, 2004; contra: Evans & Andersen, 2005 for the UK; Barisione, 2007 for Italy).

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One of the most crucial consequences of personalization lies (or at least, should lie) in the increasing centrality of perceived leaders' personality in the individual voting calculus. Previous research has shown the declining role of sociological (Franklin et al., 1992) and long-term psychological factors (Dalton, 1988) in structuring individuals' voting behavior. This has led to a progressive individualization of vote choices (Bellucci & Whiteley, 2006) that implies, among other things, an increased likelihood to “vote differently from one election to another, depending on the particular persons competing…Voters tend increasingly to vote for a person and no longer for a party or a platform” (Manin, 1997: 219).

Before moving to an assessment of leader effects on individual voting behavior in democratic elections, an operational definition is in order. The crucial question is how leaders' personal characteristic are intended to influence voters' choice. King (2002) argues that leaders' personality can impact voting behavior either directly or indirectly. The indirect leader effect consists in the influence that a leader exerts on voters “not as a result of anything he or she is, but as a result of things that he or she does…while…by direct effects is meant the influence that a leader or candidate exerts on voters by virtue of who he or she is, how he or she appears and how he or she publicly comports him or herself” (King, 2002: 4).

In the reminder of this section, we will concentrate on the most relevant studies that have attempted to assess the direct leader effect on voters' behavior in both presidential (e.g., United States) and parliamentary (e.g., Britain, Germany, and Italy) systems. As it will be shown, leader effects are comparatively smaller in the latter because of the institutional arrangement and a somewhat stronger role of partisan affiliations in these systems. Nonetheless, there are a number of conditions that make party leaders especially important in the voting calculus of citizens, regardless of the political system in which the election takes place: to this is devoted the last subsection.

4.1. Leader effects in presidential systems

How far voters will base their voting decision on the personal profile of the contenders depends heavily on the political and institutional structure in which an election is fought. Presidential elections encourage to focus on personalities to a greater degree than do parliamentary ones (McAllister, 1996). This is because the executive authority in presidential systems “resides with an individual who is [directly] elected to the position…In addition, party discipline is often weak in presidential systems, since the president's political survival does not depend on the unity of the governing party” (McAllister, 2007: 575). Evidently, the electoral system employed fosters the personalization of the office: voters in majoritarian systems are in fact asked to vote for a person. A number of comparative analyses show the clear difference in terms of electoral impact of leaders in presidential systems as compared to parliamentary ones (Curtice, 2003; Curtice & Holmerg, 2005; Holmberg & Oscarsson, 2004).

With respect to the American case (the most analyzed so far in the literature) it has been repeatedly shown that the perceived attributes of political leaders are at the core of Americans' voting behavior. According to the already cited study by Miller and Miller (1976), “candidate-related attributes are short-term forces that have sharply affected the individual vote decision in the national presidential elections between 1952 and 1972” (833). This emerges clearly in the first empirical contribution devoted to the impact of party leaders' personality on individual vote behavior. On the basis of his multivariate analysis of ANES data from the period 1952–1964, Stokes (1966) concludes that favorable attitudes toward a presidential candidate's personality produce without exceptions a significant gain (in terms of votes) for the candidate's party net of the effect exerted by individuals' partisan affiliations, issue opinions and economic evaluations. This is particularly the case in the 1952 and 1956 elections, when Eisenhower's personality appears to have brought an advantage of four to eight points respectively to the Republican Party. On the contrary, the 1964 election showed how a ‘weak’ (in terms of perceived personal image) candidate as Goldwater could cost the Grand Old Party as much as five percentage points, giving the way to Johnson's victory.

The study of leader effects in U.S. presidential elections flourished in the 1970s. The decline of traditional social and partisan alignments made election outcomes ever more affected by voters' evaluation of presidential candidates. It is the case of 1972 election, when a popular negative perception of his personal image cost George McGovern the victory (Popkin, Gorman, & Phillips, 1976). The same explanation has been provided for Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980 (Markus, 1982). By the 1980s, there has been even more room for individualized vote choices. A survey by Larry Sabato showed that 92% of Americans were in agreement with the sentence ‘I always vote for the person who I think is best, regardless of what party they belong to’ (quoted in Dalton & Wattenberg, 1993: 203). What matters the most, as argued by Wattenberg (1991), is that American voters “have not only increasingly said that they vote for the man rather than the party; they have actually done so with great frequency” (158). In one recent instance, public perception of presidential candidates' personality might have been even decisive for the electoral outcome. An analysis of the hardly contested victory of George W. Bush in 2000 by Bartels (2002) suggests that this election might have been decided by the voters' evaluation of personality-related characteristics of the candidates. According to this study, Bush's ability to be perceived as a stronger leader (as compared to his opponent, Al Gore, and once every other possible influence on individual voting behavior is taken into account) might have gained him a tiny, yet perhaps crucial, 0.4% of the votes (probit analysis estimate).

4.2. Leader effects in parliamentary systems

Parliamentary systems are based on the responsible party government model. In such model, political leaders are not supposed to play much of a role. Parties compete on the basis of a number of policies they promise to enact in the case they will win elections. It is party platforms then, rather than party leaders, to drive votes (McAllister, 1996). This model suggests two different reasons why leader effects in parliamentary systems can be thought to be negligible: (i) the comparatively

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stronger role of long-term partisan affiliations within parliamentary democracies, which is due to the dominant role of parties in the political system, and (ii) the structural and institutional constraints common to all parliamentary systems.

Parties are central actors of democratic politics, so almost all political phenomena can be evaluated within a partisan framework (Miller, 1976). It is for this reason that, since its introduction in the mid-1950s, the concept of party identification has been central to the evolution of electoral behavior studies on both sides of the Atlantic (Bartle & Bellucci, 2009; Budge, Crewe, & Farlie, 1976; Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960; Miller & Shanks, 1996). In its original formulation, party identification is conceived as a “psychological identification, which can persist without legal recognition or evidence of formal membership and even without a consistent record of party support” (Campbell et al., 1960: 121). The social–psychological view holds that party identifications act to filter individuals' views of the political world, providing them not only with a means for making voting decisions, but also with a means for interpreting issues and candidates. For this reason, some have come to define partisanship as the ‘ultimate cost-saving device’ (Fiorina, 1990). Partisanship offers in fact a vital cue to partisans: because of such psychological sense of identification, “the individual tends to see what is favorable to his partisan orientation” (Campbell et al., 1960: 133) — this being either policies or leaders. Accordingly, partisans are inclined to favor a particular policy just because is proposed or adopted by the party they identify with, while they are likely to oppose to the very same policy if it was proposed by a different party. By the same token, “they would tend to like a party leader, irrespective of their personal qualities, if that leader were the leader of their own party, and to dislike them if they were leading a different party” (Curtice, 2003: 4). Therefore leader images differ from voter to voter depending on the voter's particular belief (Feldman & Conover, 1983). In other words, party identification theory postulates leader evaluations as a mere consequence of a pre-existing partisan affiliations, being party leaders evaluated through the perceptual filter of partisanship. Hence, one likes the party leader because is partisan, and not the other way around.

Such an interpretation of voters' behavior leaves little room for party leaders (as well as other short-term forces, such as issue opinions, and performance evaluations) to exert an independent effect on individual vote choices. Moreover, the electoral impact of leaders is further constrained by the legislative nature of parliamentary elections. Voters face in fact “a structural situation where the crucial choice is between parties rather than the personal stands and qualities of prime ministerial candidates” (Dalton et al., 2000: 51), and even though the identity of the potential candidates to the premiership is well-known by the public, a number of problems, both theoretical and methodological, makes extremely difficult to isolate a vote for a leader to a vote for his party (or coalition). For this reason pure leader effects are, as a rule, ‘barely detectable’ (Barisione, 2009b; see also the various chapters in King, 2002). However, some recent studies show that, if any, countries with majoritarian elections display stronger leader effects as compared to countries where PR systems are used (Holmberg & Oscarsson, 2004; contra: Curtice & Blais, 2001). Also, there is some evidence that “leader evaluations may be a little more important when voters are deciding whether to vote for one of the two big parties” (Curtice, 2003: 15; see also: Kroh, 2004), or, at any rate, where “the two largest parties are the pivots of alternating majority governments” (Barisione, 2009b: 477) — as it is the case, for instance, in Britain, Germany, and the Second Italian Republic.

4.2.1. Great Britain The academic interest in the effect of leaders' personalities on British voting behavior dates as early as the pioneering

research by Butler and Stokes (1974). Although these authors do not exclude in principle the possibility that leaders' personal characteristics might affect individuals' voting behavior, they also highlight the fact that in early 1970s “attitudes towards the parties were a better guide to voting behavior than were attitudes towards the leaders” (Butler & Stokes, 1974: 367). The most celebrated article by Bean and Mughan (1989) does not alter these conclusions substantially. If on the one hand they show that in the British election of 1983 leaders' personality traits did have an impact on vote choice net of other factors, it must be noted as well that once party identification is included in their regression model “leadership qualities can be seen to contribute between four and five percentage points to the explained variance” (Bean & Mughan, 1989: 1172; similar results are reported in Graetz & McAllister, 1987). Stewart and Clarke (1992) are more confident in the personalization hypothesis, concluding that in 1987 “leader images, net of pre-campaign party identification, had large effects” (Stewart & Clarke, 1992: 467). The same view is shared by Mughan (2000) with respect to the Conservative's thin-sized victory of 1992, when, according to the author's calculations, widely positive evaluations of John Major made the difference “between the formation of a majority Conservative government and a hung Parliament” (Mughan, 2000: 114). On the contrary, the evidence presented by Bartle and Crewe (2002) with regard to the 1997 election underlines the rather insignificant effect of party leaders image on voting choice, once pre-existing political orientations are included in the regression model. According to these authors, positive evaluations of Tony Blair won in that occasion a mere 1.7% of the votes to the Labour Party. As they conclude, “[g]iven our information about a voter's social background, partisan predispositions, policy preferences, and evaluations of national conditions, their assessment of the attributes of party leaders added very little to our ability to predict how they voted” (Bartle & Crewe, 2002: 93). In their analysis of the British election of 2001, Clarke, Sanders, Stewart, and Whiteley (2004) test different rival models of voting choice, concluding that “all of the models have something to say [but] some models have much more to say than others. The party leader and party identification models provide the strongest explanation” (Clarke et al., 2004: 124). Yet they also observe that, regardless of the electoral choice model investigated, Tony Blair's party won first and foremost because of their “commanding lead in party identifiers” (ibid.: 123). To sum up, British party leaders have mattered and still matter (but not more than before) in Britons' voting decision. However, their net effect gets regularly downsized once individuals' political predispositions, such as their partisan affiliations, are introduced in the statistical model.

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4.2.2. Germany Political parties have had such a substantial role in the Federal Republic that post-war Germany has rightly been defined a

parteienstaat (Arzheimer, 2006). For this reason, the relative importance of party identifications vis-à-vis leader evaluations on individuals' vote choice is even more accentuated in the German context. In his analysis of eight federal elections held between 1961 and 1987, Kaase (1994) concluded that “[n]ot only is the short-term (issue and candidate) component of the voting intention in comparison to partisanship insubstantial (in terms of explained variance); it also does not systematically increase in importance over time, as a personalization concept would require” (Kaase, 1994: 226; contra: Schmitt & Ohr, 2000). Similar findings are reported in a more recent study by Brettschneider and Gabriel (2002). As their empirical analysis of 1997 Federal election shows, “the influence of competing party leaders is strongly mediated by such situational factors as the strength as well as the direction of partisan affiliation” (Brettschneider & Gabriel, 2002: 153).

4.2.3. Italy During the First Republic (1946–1994), Italian elections used to be more an expressive than an instrumental act of political

participation (Bellucci, 2007). In this context electoral mobility was highly constrained by traditional sources of electoral stabilization such as ideology, religion, and social class, thus leaving little space for voters' evaluation of individual politicians to affect their vote choice. If personas appeared already on the political scene during the 1980s (Pasquino, 1990), the academic interest in their effects on voting behavior flourished with the emergence of the Second Republic and its new patterns of political competition. The first attempt to appraise the role of party leader images on Italians' voting behavior is to be found in an article by Venturino (2000). His study of the 1996 election reveals however that the strongest determinant of voting for a party was the voters' evaluation of it rather than that of its leader — and this conclusion holds for every party under analysis. The picture is somehow mixed with respect to the following election of 2001, won by Silvio Berlusconi's center-right coalition. According to Sani (2002) party leaders played in that occasion a significant role even net of other potentially relevant factors — and this was especially the case for the figure of Berlusconi (what the author refers to as the B Factor). However, different conclusions are reached by Grasso (2005) in her analysis of the same election. According to this author, what mattered the most in individuals' voting decision were indeed their pre-existing feelings of political belonging (e.g., party identification). A study by Barisione (2007) on 2004 voting intentions brings a more convincing portrait of the role of party leaders in attracting votes to their parties in virtue of how they are evaluated as persons. However, his analysis of open-ended survey questions about the respondents' main reason to vote as such shows that leader effects are limited to the major parties on the center-right (for a tentative explanation, see below), and even there the magnitude of the effect is significant (e.g., 5–6 percentage points) but not spectacular.

4.3. Conditions under which political leaders' personality can be especially important

There are a number of factors that can sharply affect the role of party leaders as determinants of individual vote behavior in democratic elections. Some are epiphenomenal, based on the peculiar context in which a particular election takes place; others are more general, and relate to socio-political trends common to all advanced industrial democracies.

A first factor consists in the presence (or absence) of a dominant climate of opinion. According to Barisione (2009b) the probability for party leaders to be influential declines in presence of a pervasive climate of opinion with respect to the incumbent government activity, being it either favorable or adverse (e.g., the time for change phenomenon). In other words, a first condition for party leaders to be influential (or at least, not to be trivial) lies in the absence of a widespread climate of opinion. Its presence can indeed have an effect also on the specific characteristics required by the electorate. Telling examples, in this respect, are the U.S. presidential elections of 1976 and 2004. As to the former, it was held shortly after the Watergate scandal, and therefore took place in an opinion climate widely skewed in favor of candidates characterized by honesty and moral integrity in the eyes of the public; in the latter, on the contrary, the post 9/11 opinion climate favored the candidate scoring higher on leadership strength. In both cases, the electoral outcome matched with the dominant climate of opinion.

Also a situation of systemic crisis of the political system can boost significantly the role of political leaders as vote catalysts. Contrary to the ‘climate of opinion’ factor however, in this case it is the presence of a situation of crisis to ignite personalization — a systemic crisis being a fundamental pre-requisite for the emergence of a charismatic leadership (Weber, 1922). Clear examples of the sort come from the 1990s transitions in Italy and Russia, in the light of the fundamental role exerted by key political figures (e.g., Silvio Berlusconi and Boris Yeltsin, respectively) in the process.

A further contextual factor favoring the role of political leaders is the closeness of the electoral outcome itself. According to King (2002), “the impact of leaders' characteristics will be at its greatest, and is most likely to be decisive, when the outcome of the election under consideration would in any case have been extremely close” (42). A number of examples: the English elections of 1964, February 1974, and 1992; the German election of 1972; and the American presidential election of 2000 (see Section 4.1).

Each of the aforementioned factors can (and did) affect the outcome of a particular election. Yet there is a more general and pervasive trend that makes reasonable to hypothesize an increased importance of party leaders regardless of the specific electoral context. We refer to the process of partisan dealignment (Dalton, 1984) among Western electorates. As hypothesized by King (2002), “the impact of leaders' personalities and other personal characteristics will be greatest when voters' emotional ties to parties are at their weakest” (41). With regard to the widespread partisan dealignment occurred across all advanced industrial democracies in the past several decades, it has been described as the most profound change in voting behavior since the 1920s (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000). Accordingly, one might argue that in times of weakening partisan bonds among the public, “how voters view their leaders will also change significantly as a result…In the absence of party cues, voters will rely more heavily on the

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appeal of the personalities of the leaders in order to decide their vote” (McAllister, 2007: 582). Very few studies have tested empirically this proposition. Among the exception, it is worth mentioning a comparative study of 15 countries by Curtice and Blais (2001). However, in their analysis of CSES (Comparative Study of Electoral Systems) data, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that voters are more likely to vote on the basis of leader evaluations in countries where levels of party identification are comparatively lower — a rather unexpected conclusion, that cries for more empirical testing.

What does appear to really matter – in spite of the political and electoral system in which the election takes place – is indeed the ideological orientation of voters. The literature seems to concur in identifying right-wing voters as comparatively more likely to cast their vote on the basis of leader personalities. A number of studies conducted on varied settings such as Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands, have demonstrated that leader effects are especially pronounced for right-wing parties (Barisione, 2007; Lobo, 2006; Van der Brug & Mughan, 2007), and these conclusions are further supported by a comparative analysis of six European parliamentary democracies (Lobo, 2008).

5. Discussion and avenues for further research

As outlined in our introduction, classic studies of political leadership were characterized by their primary focus on the personality of leaders themselves, while few or no attention was paid to the part played by followers in the emergence, maintenance, and decline of a leadership. The spread of democratic practices and the emergence of survey research in the second half of the last century have however brought the attention to the crucial role of followers (voters) in the process. Because of the fact that democratic leadership entails the voters' consent, it slowly became clear that perceptions, desires, and expectations of followers had to be taken into account in every study concerned with political leadership. Based on transactional models (Hollander, 1992), the more recent literature on political leadership, as reviewed in this article, provides us with the means to interpret the rise and fall of individual politicians to leadership positions, thus shedding light on the dynamics of contemporary political leadership in advanced industrial democracies.

In recent times, political leaders have become increasingly visible to mass publics due to the ongoing process of personalization of politics in Western democracies. This is a complex phenomenon, caused as we have seen by the dynamic interplay of two factors: technological innovations in the media sphere, on the one hand, and organizational changes within political parties, on the other hand (see Fig. 1). As a result, individual politicians, and party leaders in particular, have become central to political communication.

One of the consequences of the personalization of politics seems to lie in the changing expectations of voters with respect to the personal profile of their leaders. As explained above, political leaders are evaluated on the basis of a restricted number of categories, such as competence and integrity (Miller et al., 1986), and these categories are at the core of the public's idealized conception of a political leader (Kinder et al., 1980). However, it has been also shown that this idealized image does not affect the ways in which voters weigh up actual candidates. A tentative explanation based on the literature reviewed here can rely on Meyrowitz's (1985) argument about the lowering effect of television that has ‘reduced’ leaders to the level of their public. This effect is further reinforced by leaders themselves, that are increasingly likely to draw their authority “not by being beyond people”, but “by being of and like them” (Renshon, 1995: 201). Accordingly, the inner dynamics of political leaders' evaluation by followers have been affected to a substantial extent. Previous research demonstrates that nowadays voters evaluate politicians using the same framework employed in everyday life (Rahn et al., 1990) and thus “make their comparative candidate judgments within the context of their perceptions of everyday people” (Sullivan et al., 1990: 463).

It is in the light of this that the constant struggle of contemporary political leaders to appear, for as much as possible, as an ordinary Joe must be interpreted. As well explained by Caprara and Zimbardo (2004), “[w]e want to trust competent leaders, but we also want to like them personally, and this is easier when they are perceived as essentially similar to us” (590). However, it must be kept in mind that the perception of such similarities occurs, for the greatest part, in the sphere of image and communication. In this respect, the role of professionals from the field of political marketing emerges as crucial in the process. Enormous campaign resources (e.g., money and time) are invested by politicians in shaping their image in a way that appeals to the largest possible number of voters, and this is done in the expectation that a likeable image is what really matters to them.

However, the above discussion of leaders'direct effect in parliamentary elections seems to clash with such expectations. Voters are in fact supposed to evaluate politics (as well as politicians) within a partisan framework (Miller, 1976) and therefore base their choice on long-term political affiliations (e.g., party identification). Here, we will briefly provide an alternative point of view on the subject matter, in the hope that it will be of help for further analyses of the role of party leaders in democratic elections.

Our argument is based on the often overlooked (in the literature) role of party leaders in shaping individuals' partisan attachments. Already in 1968, and against the orthodox assumptions of party identification concept set forth by Campbell et al. (1960), V. O. Key anticipated a later, cognitive psychological view of partisanship, hypothesizing that “[l]ike or dislike of a political personality…bring shifts in party identification” (1968; quoted in Clarke et al., 2004). It is the case, for instance, of the so-called Reagan Democrats, conquered to the Republican cause by the appeal of former U.S. President (Greenberg, 1996). A number of empirical analyses demonstrate that the assessment of party leaders' personality by voters can bear a significant effect on their long-standing attitudes towards the party (see, for instance: Page & Jones, 1979 for the U.S.; Venturino, 2000 for Italy). A more recent study of three established parliamentary democracies (Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) provides further confirmation of this hint, showing that one's evaluation of a party leader has become in the last decade the strongest determinant of alignment with the party itself (Garzia, 2011). According to this interpretation, then, the electoral effect of an attractive leader needs not to be found in the net gain of votes due to his/her strictly personal appeal — that is, independently of the party (King, 2002). Rather, the

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leader effect should lie in the improved image in voters' mind of the party he leads and personifies (Barisione, 2006; Curtice, 2003; Webb, 2004). In this sense, leaders can be thought to affect voting choices through partisanship (see Fig. 2).

Of course, the basic diagram proposed in Fig. 2 does not intend to capture all the numerous factors that might affect a voter's choice (e.g., ideological orientations, economic evaluations, issue positioning, and so on). Rather, its more modest aim is that of providing political leadership scholars with a synthetic account of the crucial role gained by contemporary leaders as primary objects of political cognition for voters, as well as major cause (and not anymore mere reflection) of partisan affiliations and vote choices in turn.

It is no doubt that “huge empirical and statistical obstacles [must] be vanquished” (Mitbø, 1997: 152) in order to disentangle conclusively the role of leaders from that of their parties as determinant of voters' choice. In this respect, the spread of primary elections around the Western world (Hazan, 2002) represents a great opportunity for leadership scholars to assess the role of personality in electoral contexts in which partisanship represents a constant rather than a variable.

In all probability, supporters of the social–psychological interpretation of voting behavior will disagree with the position assigned to party leaders in our revised funnel of causality. Hopefully, this will call leadership scholars to further analytical efforts on the changing, increasingly central role of political leaders in the ever more personalized polities of the third millennium.

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