Elections are about choosing who will govern. In an attempt to go beyond this truism, political science has devoted tremendous resources to understand how voters come to their decision. In their seminal work on voting behavior in the United States, The American Voter (1960), Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes emphasized the importance of partisan identification. Their work was sometimes interpreted as underplaying the importance of the personality of the people who lead these parties in influencing the decision of voters. Given the enduring influence of The American Voter, it comes as no surprise that the study of the impact of the personality of leaders on the voters had long been neglected. Identifying what they perceive to be a gap in the literature, Marina Costa Lobo and John Curtis gathered contributions from scholars in eight different countries to investigate “the role that voters’ perceptions and evaluations of leaders play nowadays in democratic elections” (p. 6).

If the idea seems to make intuitive sense for citizens, journalists, and political consultants, the actual testing of whether the personality of political leaders matters to the outcome of democratic elections remains a daunting task. The contributors to this edited volume resort to meticulous empirical methods to demonstrate first that leaders actually do matter and, then, try to discern how this leader effect varies based on the institutional context and based on the sophistication of the voters.

The central argument of this book is that the importance of the perception of leaders' personality in electoral outcomes should be reasserted. More controversial is the conclusion many of the contributors draw: The tendency of voters to rely on these perceptions does not need to be cast in a negative light. Against the usual view that denounces a supposed shift from a battle of ideas to a beauty pageant, they argue that a vote based on the perceived personalities of leaders should be seen as just as rational as resorting to ideology or partisan identification.

Amanda Bittner writes that “maybe it is not such a bad thing for voters to focus on party leaders” (p. 35). The perception of leaders is a heuristic that allows voters to come to a decision more easily. The fact that it is easier does not mean they will draw the wrong conclusions. Besides, Romain Lachat explains that “a strong impact of leader evaluations on party preferences does not mean that citizens look only at leaders' characteristics, and not at more substantial aspects of parties and candidates” (p. 120). On the other hand, in the context of post-communist Romanian democracy, Andrei Gheorghita is more circumspect and warns against this “shallow perspective on politics in general, and electoral politics in particular” (p. 210).

To achieve a coherent whole, the ten chapters are organized into four sections. The first section focuses on the origins of leader evaluations in order to disentangle the endogenous effect of partisanship. Using different data-sets that cover 10 countries and two different methods, the two chapters reach the same conclusion, namely that voters do see leaders through partisan eyes. The third section of the book questions the traditional opposition between informed voters, whose votes are supposed to be based on ideological and partisan cues, and uniformed voters who resort to the evaluation of leaders as an alternative. Studying the example of Spain, Guillem Rico finds “few and no consistent differences in the importance ascribed to leadership considerations” (p. 144). This conclusion adds to Amanda Bittner's earlier demonstration that all voters ascribe partisan stereotypes to party leaders. In fact, the vision of the most educated voters tends to conform more with the partisan stereotype (p. 33). On the other hand, Marina Costa Lobo's study of the dealigned electorates of Portugal, Spain, and Italy points to a differentiated impact of leader effects: The more alienated they are from party organization, the more they tend to rely on the image they have of the leaders (p. 164). As Michael Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau point out, “images are just that—images - and they may be little attached to the truth” (p. 186). Depending on the chapters, it thus seems that we go back and forth between a neutral or even positive vision of the leader effects on voters to a somewhat darker one.

In an attempt to further the apparent rehabilitation of the voters, the second section of the book analyzes how the importance of the leader effect can vary depending on the institutional context. The chapters written by John Curtis and Marco Lisi, Solidea Formichelli, and Romain Lachat indicate that voters seem to be rational in their use of leaders' evaluations by giving more importance to leaders in electoral contexts—e.g. presidential regimes - where they actually do matter more. The fourth section tries to delve further into the construction of the evaluation of leaders.

The overarching organization of the book is not always clear. The division in unequal sections and chapters of overlapping concerns take the reader from country to country using different methodologies. Nevertheless, the various contributions all point to a clear conclusion: The perceived personality of leaders matter. The strength of this conclusion alone is significant. In addition, thanks to this work, the traditional preconception of personality traits as an inferior motivation for inferior voters should continue to come under more scrutiny.

As with every edited volume, the coherence of the whole can prove challenging. This problem is obviously more acute when dealing with countries as different as Romania and the United States. The chapters that resort to cross country comparisons all carefully lay out the limits of the data (e.g. p. 92), but despite the tremendous work of scholars involved with the Comparative Study of Electoral System (CSES) or the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP), there is always an inherent risk in comparing surveys across linguistic and national borders. On the other side of the spectrum, the authors of the three case studies that focus on just one country take pains to explain the specificity of the national context and the danger of extrapolating their results. Concerning the case of France, this reviewer noted a minor error (contrary to what is affirmed on page 186, Jacques Chirac actually did not “carry the day” in the 1988 election).

What really stands out is the methodological precision of all the chapters. This is a testament to the coherence of the approach pursued by the editors. Yet, given the bold normative assumptions around the issue, it might have been useful to include a theoretical perspective on the impact of leader effect on the quality of our democracies to give additional depth to the volume. This quibble aside, Personality Politics? does fulfill its bold promise and offers a nuanced, rich and articulate defense of the idea that the voters' perceptions of their leaders is a fruitful field of scientific inquiry.