Centralized or decentralized personalization? Measuring Intra-party Competition in Open and Flexible list PR systems

This article proposes a comparative analysis of electoral intra-party competition in four countries – Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland and Luxembourg - via two indicators: the Gini coefficient and the effective number of candidates (ENC). The two measures allow describing the nature of intra-party competition over time, across countries and across party lists. Two elements stand out. First, in terms of change over time (personalization) – unlike hypothesized in the presidentialization thesis – there is no concentration of intra-party competition around a few leaders over time. Second, when it comes to describing the actual nature of intra-party competition (personalized politics), the results show that the current concepts of the literature should move beyond a clear-cut divide between centralized and decentralized forms of personalized politics. Instead, intra-party competition is best described by the concept of ‘elitization’, meaning the concentration of most votes on a medium-sized group of candidates.