Toward a Theory of Personalist Parties: Concept Formation and Theory Building

Abstract

Personalistic leadership—the exercise of authority vested in influential individuals based on personal attributes rather than organizational role—is a political phenomenon not limited by time or space. But what do we mean when we say that a political leader or a party is “personalistic”? While the theme of personalist leadership is not absent from political analyses, there is a lack of scholarly consensus on core elements of the concept itself. The goal of this article is to define in clearer terms what personalism is and how it differs from concepts such as charisma, populism, and anti‐establishment politics. We introduce a parsimonious definition based on intra‐organizational power and identify a party as personalist if two conditions are met: a dominant leader and a weakly structured organization. Finally, we present a more comprehensive typology of parties based on those two criteria and briefly illustrate the utility of our approach for explaining personalist formations as a distinct organizational type.