After pointing out the main contributions of each chapter, the concluding chapter offers an integral look at the patterns that appear when investigating personal and collegial democratic institutional orders. It finds that each regime has specific dosages and combinations of collegialism and personalism. Personalism, especially of the centralized type, is negatively correlated with democracy. Thus, our recommendation is to balance collegialism and personalism between and within institutions and especially counter (and, if possible, decrease) centralized personalism.

In this chapter, we develop a comprehensive typology, alongside measurements of personalism and collegialism, of cabinets and governments in democracies. The scholarly literature identifies and addresses the personal and collegial elements within governments in democracies, but falls short of proposing a comprehensive typology and compatible measurements. We present what we call the Cabinet-Government Model, which includes two perspectives: a narrow one that focuses on the cabinet and a wider one that also relates to the interaction of the cabinet with other political institutions (parliament, election, bureaucracy, party) and thus refers to the government as a whole. After listing the ideal types of collegial and personal governments, we chart its measurements. We then analyze 28 democratic governments using materials from various databases and constitutional sources. The analysis identifies a high level of variation in personalism between cabinets and governments throughout the democratic world, demonstrates that a focus on the cabinet alone is not sufficient for capturing levels of personalism of governments, and paints a more nuanced picture than the hitherto-simple categorization of parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential governments.

This book examines two patterns of democracy – collegial and personal – through a comprehensive comparison of political institutions. It develops a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological basis for differentiating collegial and personal democracies. Central institutions in democracy are classified according to their levels of personalism and collegialism, including political parties, candidate selection methods and electoral systems, legislature, and cabinets and governments. The book presents preliminary findings concerning the causes for this variance between the two democratic regime types. The book will be of key interest to students and scholars of democratic institutions, personalism and personalization, political parties and, more broadly, democracy.

After briefly presenting a classification of collegial and personal parties, this chapter outlines three useful indices of centralized personalism in parties at the country level. They examine (1) the formal power of the party leaders, based on the codification of party regulations; (2) an estimation of the centrality of the party leaders in their parties, based on an expert survey; and (3) an estimation of the centrality of the ruling party leader, based on a codification of historical narratives. The chapter ends with a demonstration of the validity and usefulness of these indices. It presents bivariate analyses (1) of the relationships between levels of party personalism in democracies and government system types – identifying less personalism in parliamentary systems, though the difference is highly significant and quite strong only regarding ruling party personalism, and (2) of the relationships between levels of party personalism in democracies and various democrtaic aspects (age group, quality of the democracy, democratic culture). All correlations for all indices are moderate and significant: older democracies (first and second wave), more liberal and free democracies, and democracies with a strong democratic political culture are found to have less personal parties.

The introductory chapter frames the conceptual and theoretical bases for the distinction between personal and collegial democracies that our book proposes. It presents three pure types of democratic institutional order: centralized-personal, collegial, and decentralized-personal. It then shows how the classification of personal versus collegial democratic orders corresponds with prominent theories and approaches to studying politics. Next, it briefly explains the book’s conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions, and its recommendations for sustaining democracy in an era of personal politics. Also, it acknowledges the major limitation of the research – the difficulty of clearly identifying centralized personalism in some cases and decentralized personalism in others. It ends with a short synopsis of each of the chapters that follow.

While some studies show ideological asymmetry in outgroup bias between rightists and leftists, those studies often target an ideologically biased outgroup. Here, we bypass this issue by targeting the ideological outgroups (rightists for leftists, and leftists for rightists). We rely on a magnetoencephalography-based approach delineating function-specific neural mechanisms to test for ideological asymmetries at multiple levels: explicit psychological self-reports, implicit behavioral bias, and neural oscillations. Using a computational model balancing the stimuli and screening 81 rightists and leftist Israeli individuals, we find ideological asymmetry with rightists being more biased at all three levels. Furthermore, the neural results add important insights by uncovering two underlying mechanisms: The first (late beta-band motor activity) is strongly associated with implicit behavior, while the second (early alpha-band dorsal anterior cingulate activity) reveal an antileftist bias for both groups. We discuss implications of the findings on bias, ideological asymmetry, their neural underpinnings, and social norms.

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today’s democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who “owns” the party.

In his monumental On Justice and Rights, the Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535-1600) discussed the legal and ethical aspects of the Portuguese trade in African and Asian enslaved persons. Molina surveys, develops, and problematizes the criteria necessary for the legitimate possession, sale, and purchase of human freedom. He insists that, even under legally valid slavery, persons who have sold or lost their freedom have inalienable rights as human beings, such as the freedom to make contracts, to marry, and even, under certain circumstances, to sue their owners in court. Molina also devotes attention to the ways in which slavery could be ended and whether and under what circumstances slaves had the right to escape from their owners. Well informed about the political structures and customs of many peoples in Africa, as well as Japan, China, and India, Molina paints a vivid and detailed picture of Portuguese trade. He gives specific accounts of the origins and development of the slave trade, region by region, and of the nature of the relationship between local rulers and the Portuguese kingdom. In doing so, he carefully describes the deception, coercion, and general indifference that pervades this trade regarding the rights to freedom of these people. It also attempts to identify the political, ecclesiastical, and market agents involved in this great injustice and their varying degrees of culpability. While Molina does not condemn slavery as a legal institution, the deeply flawed and even immoral behavior of sellers, buyers, regulators, and political rulers both in Portugal and in the slave-supplying regions that Molina denounces casts a heavy shadow on the morality of the trade.

How should we understand social progress, and how should it be measured? These questions have engaged social thinkers and scientists for many decades. In the context of the growing dominancy of national and international indices, the paper advances a strong dual-necessity principle in the conceptualization and measurement of social progress. At the heart of the strong dual-necessity principle is a profound yet neglected conviction that, from a political-normative point of view, the two components of the concept – subjective (representing people’s actual attitudes) and objective (representing external standards of development) – are necessary and only jointly sufficient. The paper defines the principle and initiates assessment and evaluation of it. The paper demonstrates ‘concept structuring’ and exhibits how the distinctive strong dual necessity structure may result in different rankings of countries’ social progress. Hence, it highlights the advantage of having this principle readily available and accessible for researchers, politicians, bureaucrats, and other interested agents and institutions.