Introduction: Collegial versus personal democratic institutional order

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.