Micro and mass personalism: how size changes the nature of personalistic politics

Abstract

While noting a trend towards increasing personalization, the literature on personalistic politics has so far ignored population size as an explanatory factor of personalism. Departing from the question how size affects personalism, in this article we contrast the personalization literature on mass democracies with qualitative research in eight underexplored micro-democracies. Our findings demonstrate that personalistic politics is of a fundamentally different nature across the two contexts, leading us to draw a conceptual distinction between mass and micro personalism. We find that compared to mass personalism, micro personalism facilitates an even greater personalistic control of public offices and similar instrumental functions of political parties. The biggest difference, however, is that micro personalism facilitates unique direct and mutual connections between politicians and the electorate. This has important consequences for the functioning of democracy. We show that while micro personalism increases the risks of power concentration, the direct access to politicians offers greater opportunities for citizens to hold politicians accountable. Our findings therefore refine the concept of personalistic politics, and offer critical and original insights about the relationship between size, personalism, and democracy.