Personalizacija izbora: mit ili stvarnost?
Personalization of Elections: Myth or Reality?

Summary/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).

• Details
• Contents