European University Institute Library

Leaders without partisans, dealignment, media change, and the personalization of politics, Diego Garzia, Frederico Ferreira de Silva, and Andrea De Angelis

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Leaders without partisans

bibliography

1249713851

Diego Garzia, Frederico Ferreira de Silva, and Andrea De Angelis

dealignment, media change, and the personalization of politics

"Leaders without Partisans examines the changing impact of party leader evaluations on voters' behavior in parliamentary elections. The decline of traditional social cleavages, the pervasive mediatization of the political scene, and the media's growing tendency to portray politics in "personalistic" terms all led to the hypothesis that leaders matter more for the way individuals vote and, often, the way elections turn out. This study offers the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of this hypothesis so far. The authors develop a composite theoretical framework - based on currently disconnected strands of research from party, media, and electoral studies - and test it empirically on the most encompassing set of national election study datasets ever assembled. The labor-intensive harmonization effort produces an unprecedented dataset pooling information for a total of 129 parliamentary elections conducted between 1961 and 2018 in 14 West European countries. The book provides evidence of the longitudinal growth in leader effects on vote choice and on turnout. The process of partisan dealignment and changes in the structure of mass communication in Western societies are identified as the main drivers of personalization in voting behavior"--, Provided by publisher

Foreword / Russell J. Dalton And Martin P. Wattenberg -- Party change, media change and electoral change -- Patterns of partisan dealignment -- The personalization of party choice -- Voting in the television age -- Voting in the digital age -- The rise of negative personalization -- The changing nature of the personalization of politics