Party Types in the Age of Personalized Politics

Abstract

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today’s democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who “owns” the party.

The personalization of the Likud in the era of Netanyahu

“…He has succeeded, step by step, based on the existing institutionalized platform, in transforming Likud into a party almost synonymous with himself. The Likud of 2023 is not just a formalized “leader” party, a party in which the selected leader has many powers because of holding the party leader position; it adopted many features of a personal party (Rahat forthcoming). Netanyahu almost established a new party when he took the Likud from its unprecedented loss in 2006 to its hold on government from 2009.…”

“…An expression for it is that Likud (and its predecessor Herut) had only four leaders in the 1949–2022 era, while Mapai/Labor, its main competitor in most of that period, had 14. It was an institutionalized leader party rather than a personal one (Rahat forthcoming). Moreover, after Menachem Begin, its founding leader, left politics in 1983, the contest for Likud leadership became competitive.…”

From ‘Anomaly’ to ‘Laboratory’? Fratelli d’Italia, Illiberalism and the Study of Right-Wing Parties in Western Europe

“… 3. Indeed, the second key trigger of FdI’s foundation was Berlusconi’s U-turn on his decision not to run as leader of the coalition in the forthcoming 2013 general election. In Rahat’s (2022) typology of the ‘parties in the age of personalization’, the People of Freedom is the only party belonging to the most personal type which resulted from the merger of two pre-existing parties. …”