Personalism and Personalist Regimes

Personalist leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko or Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, are increasingly prominent players in the international landscape; their motivations and policies, however, are poorly understood. The regimes they lead are difficult to examine, mostly because of their most defining feature-an inordinate concentration of power in the hands of one single individual. Yet, personalist leaders do not rule alone, even if they do not always govern through institutional channels.

How do personalist regimes really work? How do their rulers acquire and maintain personal control? How does contemporary personal rule differ from how it was practised during the Cold War? These are the key questions addressed in Personalism and Personalist Regimes, which offers a systematic examination of the logic of personalism, or personalist rule, tackling comprehensively the study of personalist leaders and personalist regimes. The book is underpinned by a theoretical framework that combines historical and comparative analyses, brought forward through a series of detailed country studies authored by a distinguished group of comparativists and area studies experts. The book also revisits, and builds upon, Sultanistic Regimes, the seminal study by H.E. Chehabi and Juan Linz. In contrast to Sultanistic Regimes that studied sultanism-an extreme form of personalism-Personalism and Personalist Regimes examines personal rule on its full continuum, from Turkey under Erdo?an or Venezuela under Maduro, to Turkmenistan under Berdimuhamedov or Libya under Gaddafi. Because personalism, or personal rule, can be present across all regimes, the book also includes several studies of personalism and institutions in party dictatorships, China or Cuba amongst others.

Alex Baturo, Associate Professor, Dublin City University, Luca Anceschi, Professor of Eurasian Studies, The University of Glasgow, Francesco Cavatorta, Professor of Political Science, UniversitÃ(c) Laval

Alexander Baturo is Associate Professor of Government at Dublin City University. He studies democratization and authoritarian politics, in particular personalism and the breakdown of term limits. This is his fourth book on the subject, following Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits (Michigan University Press, 2014), The Politics of Presidential Term Limits (Oxford University Press, 2019) and The New Kremlinology: Understanding Regime Personalization in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Luca Anceschi is Professor of Eurasian Studies at the University of Glasgow, where he is also the editor of Europe-Asia Studies. His research is focused on the politics and international relations of Central Asia. His most recent book is Analysing Kazakhstan’s Foreign Policy. Regime neo-Eurasianism in the Nazarbaev Era (Routledge 2020).

Francesco Cavatorta is Professor of Political Science and Research Fellow at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur l’Afrique et le Moyen Orient (CIRAM), Laval University (Quebec, Canada). He has published extensively on the politics of the Arab world. His current research project is focused on party politics and the role of political parties in the region.