Personalizing electoral campaigns in multiparty systems with proportional representation. The German voter in Bundestag elections since 1980

Personalization of politics is investigated as relative importance of leadi ng politicians for the party vote (Zweitstimme) in German Bundestag electio ns, compared to the importance of parties and the recall of voting behavior in the last federal election. Contrary to recent German research on the im pact of special candidate attributes (competence, integrity etc.) we interp ret general evaluations of parties and the leading politicians as the most immediate utility attributes or distance measures of the options listed on the ballot. On the basis of this model, of discrete choice analysis as the statistical method and of the Politbarometer data of the Forschungsgruppe W ahlen, Mannheim, we estimate candidate effects in three regions of Germany, characterized by slightly different party systems (West Germany without Ba varia, Bavaria with the CSU instead of the CDU and East Germany with the PD S as a more important party than the FDP or the Greens). It is shown that r egion is important for personalization, that a general trend towards increa sing personalization does not exist, that the most popular politicians some times lose their capacity to attract voters to their party and that both at tractiveness for floating voters and repulsiveness for former party voters must be taken into account when interpreting effect parameters.