The Origins of Elected Strongmen

How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within

Bibliographic Data

ID6540972
AuthorsElizabeth Frantz (0000-0003-0021-1628, Michigan State University), Erica Frantz (Associate Professor, Michigan State University), Andrea Kendall-Taylor (Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program, Center for a New American Security (CNAS)), Joe Wright (Professor, Pennsylvania State University)
Year2024
Pages224
Publication date2024-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueThe Origins of Elected Strongmen (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780198888079.001.0001
OpenAlexW4398501949
Open LibraryOL50622711M
ISBN9780198888079
GOOGLE_BOOK_IDilX7EAAAQBAJ
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited187

Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d’état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, this book shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy. Personalist parties lack the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader’s efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters’ commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.

Political science · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Democracy · Personality and politics · Political Ideologies · Political Parties · Political Process

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