Congratulations to graduate student Jia Li and faculty member Joe Wright who, along with coauthors, recently published “Personalist ruling parties in democracies” in Democratization. This study introduces a new data set on ruling party personalism across the world’s democracies and shows its global and historical patterns in the past three decades. The authors find that when leaders backed by a personalist party win power, political polarization increases; yet we do not find that party personalism influences citizen support for democracy. The findings suggest that the election of leaders supported by personalist parties sets in motion meaningful political changes. You can read the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2021.2019711