It’s not only about the leader. Oligarchized personalization and preference voting in Belgium

Research on the electoral personalization of politics has stressed a trend towards a greater role of top prominent political figures (party leaders and ministers). This trend was described as centralized electoral personalization. Yet, this trend is merely one side of a more complex story. No leader attracts all voters’ support, and other candidates manage to stand out despite lower resources and visibility. Using a unique dataset of 47,239 actual ballot papers cast for the 2018 Belgian local elections, we show that candidates-level, lists-level and districts-level factors result in distinct preference voting behaviour. While these factors lead to unmistakable forms of (de-)centralized personalized forms of elections, we, furthermore, show that intermediary situations distinctively emerge. A significant number of ‘subtop’ candidates stand out among candidates, by attracting support from voters who do not support the mere leader of the list. This ‘oligarchized personalization’ would deserve greater attention in the literature.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Why do some countries use PR while others don’t? How electoral system trends spread across European democracies

Why do countries pick one electoral system over another? As Damien Bol , Jean-Benoit Pilet and Pedro Riera write, there is often an assumption that the choice of an electoral system is closely related to the calculations of dominant political parties who select systems that are likely to benefit them in elections. However based on a study of European countries between 1945 and 2011, they illustrate that the choice of an electoral system can be shaped significantly by the choices of neighbouring/similar states

The take-up of mechanisms designed to temper proportional representation shows that countries don’t choose their electoral systems and rules in a vacuum

Some countries attempt to ‘temper’ the political party system unpredictability by introducing measures to halt fragmentation, such as representation thresholds. Here, Damien Bol, Jean-Benoit Pilet, and Pedro Riera argue that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of other countries have made similar choices in recent years