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.KEYWORDS Dealignment; leader effects; party identification; personalisation of politics; voting behaviourThe centrality of political leaders in contemporary democracies has been sustained by an increasing amount of research in political science. From an institutional point of view, research documents a transformation in the structure and organisation of modern political parties in favour of the leadership position. From the rise of catch-all parties to the emergence of personal parties, contemporary party scholars ascribe a more prominent role to party leaders both within party organisation and as executives in government. This describes a trend towards the presidentialisation of party structures (Passarelli 2015;Poguntke and Webb 2005).

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Charismatic leaders are often assumed to drive the electoral success of populist radical right parties. Yet, little attention is given to how voter evaluations of leaders influence individual voting behavior. To our knowledge, no systematic and comparative tests of this empirical question exist. In this paper, we test to what extent voters' support for populist radical right parties is fueled by leaders' appreciation. In order to examine leader effects on the populist radical right vote, we rely on an original dataset pooling 29 National Election Studies from ten established West European parliamentary democracies (1985-2018). Our analysis finds that: (1) voters' evaluation of party leaders is significantly associated with voting for populist radical right parties; (2) leader evaluations are more important than left-right self-placement when it comes to voting for the populist radical right, and (3) leader effects are more important for populist radical right voters than for other voters.

Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there is evidence of this trend for presidential democracies, notably the United States, this linkage is yet to be fully explored for parliamentary democracies undergoing a process of personalization. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of pooled national election study data from thirteen Western European parliamentary democracies collected between 1982 and 2016. Our results show that leader effects are significantly stronger among individuals with a television-dominant media diet. The findings provide support to the yet underdeveloped theoretical relationship between media change and the personalization of politics, while also speaking to the broader question involving the importance of media for contemporary democratic elections.