Original scientific paper

Personalization of Elections: Myth or Reality?

Mirjana KASAPOVIĆ

Abstract

For two decades, the personalization of elections has been a
major subject of electoral studies as well as of political and
communication science in general. The personalistic
approach to elections is based on two fundamental
assumptions. According to the first, the end of the 20th and
the beginning of the 21st centuries have witnessed an
upsurge of candidate voting which has been supplanting
party identification and issue orientation as the traditionally
most important determinants in voters' decisions on who to
vote for in an election. According to the second, candidate
preferences are increasingly based on the media-mediated
candidate's image, mostly built around some non-political
individual features. Comparative analyses of elections have,
however, contradicted these assumptions and proved that
candidate voting is a contingent political phenomenon that
cannot be attributed to a single trend, and that candidate
preferences primarily depend on a politician's competence
and leadership. The findings of the electoral research in
Croatia in the period between 1990 and 2003 also show
that candidate voting influences voters' decisions less than
their loyalty to political parties and issue orientation in the
principally good institutional (semipresidential government,
majority and mixed-member electoral system) and
transitional conditions (weak political parties and
unstructured party system).

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

16123

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/16123

Publication date:

30.6.2004.

Article data in other languages: croatian german

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