ABSTRACT
Personality is everything, says a market-oriented form of the understanding of democracy and its development. In the course of the stabilization of democracy, the tendency is that a "pragmatic" approach to politics rather than an "ideological" one prevails. Closed "Weltanschauungen" and class-based parties are transformed into loose parties of the people that can hardly be distinguished in terms of a consistent traditional party platform, but differ only in the personali ties of their leaders. The "mature" democracies, according to the hypothesis, are characterized by their presentation of personalities rather than ideologies.
