Institutions, Candidates, and the Rhetoric of Personalism: Evidence from Latin America

Personalistic leadership has long shaped democratic competition, yet we know little about how institutional contexts condition candidates’ reliance on personal appeals. We argue that institutionalised party competition reduces candidates’ incentives to rely on personalist rhetoric. Where parties provide stronger collective anchors, self-centred appeals become less attractive; where those anchors are weak, candidates can more easily mobilise through personal visibility. To test this argument, we analyse over 40,000 X posts from 131 presidential candidates across 17 Latin American countries from 2010 to 2022, linking text-based measures of personalist rhetoric to V-Dem and V-Party indicators of institutionalisation and party organisation. Candidates in more institutionalised systems use significantly less personalist rhetoric, while party-level results vary across organisational mechanisms. Such appeals enhance voter attention only where institutional constraints are weak. The study reconceptualizes personalism as an electoral strategy and provides new comparative evidence on how institutions shape leader-centred politics.