Individualism and Centralized Political Personalism

A common perception is that cultural individualism breeds political personalism by shifting focus from the collective to the individual. If this is the case, then individualist cultural values can play a central role in consolidating personal politics, which is especially prominent in non-democratic regimes and has also been found to enhance democratic backsliding. We challenge this assumption through a comprehensive cross-national analysis of 128 countries. Drawing on multiple established measures of individualism, centralized personalism, and partyness, we find the opposite association: more individualistic societies exhibit significantly lower levels of political personalism. Additionally, individualism correlates positively with partyness, challenging claims that it undermines collegial non-personalized politics. This pattern of results largely persists across measures and when controlling for GDP per capita, regime type, population size, and regional context. For centralized personalism, individualism's negative association operates primarily through institutional mechanisms: individualistic cultures foster and sustain democratic constraints that limit leader-centered rule. Contrary to common intuition, these findings suggest that individualism, with its emphasis on autonomy and distributed authority, may provide cultural and institutional resistance to personalist rule rather than fueling it.