Replication Data for: "Charismatic Leaders and Democratic Backsliding"

An important role of political parties in democracies is to constrain the abuse of power, including by their members. Parties also prize winning elections, and nominating charismatic party leaders tends to be electorally beneficial. We show theoretically that when parties become reliant on a leader's charisma, they grow less able to sanction their behavior in office ex post. Parties recognize this, and may try to preempt it by screening out charismatic leadership candidates ex ante. However, they sometimes willingly sacrifice horizontal accountability in exchange for the electoral gains that charisma brings, foregoing their gate-keeping role. Consequently, charismatic leaders are given more room than less charismatic leaders to subvert democracy. This dynamic is more pronounced in polarized and less stable democracies, where charismatic leaders are more frequent. Associations between leaders' charisma and patterns of party personalization, party illiberalism, democratic backsliding, and democratic breakdown in cross-national data are consistent with these predictions.