This study builds upon the integral approach to political leadership, earlier research on the political capital of those who stand as candidates in parliamentary elections within party democracies, and studies about personalization and privatization in media coverage of campaigns. Theoretically, it is firtsly assumed that the leadership equation is composed by a set of factors that includes personal attributes, contextual conditions and contingent situations. Second, the candidates’ political capital is considered to entail different sub-components related to their respective experience, political parties, mediatic appeal, and constituency’s cultural and contingent political feelings. Finally, it is presumed that the prominence of candidates in the media coverage of the campaigns influences their significance in the voter’s mind.

From this perspective, the study inquires into the so called subjective, social, reputational or opinion component of the candidates’ political capital – measured in terms of knowledge and judgment. In this regard, the study questions why this dimension varies so widely across contenders, ranging from candidates who are very well known and appreciated by most of the electorate to those who are hardly identfied and valuated. Then it is hypothesized that a conjuntural casual relation explains the variance of the subjective /social /reputational /opinion component of the candidates’ political capital. More concretely, we pose that such a conjunture is composed of the candidates’ political experience within the public and the partisan arena, the extent to which their respective political parties contribute to their candidancies in their electoral market, and the candidates’ exposure to decentralized personalized and/or privatized media coverage during the electoral campaign.

With the aim of shedding more light on our understanding of the personalization of politics and elections in multilevel political systems, the study tests this casual hypothesis in the subnational electoral arena. To do so, the attention is focused on the political capital of the candidates that competed in 2015 and 2016 Spanish regional parliamentary elections for the presidency of the regional executives. Then, our research question is two-fold. Firstly, it refers to the extent to which the candidates for presidency of the regional executives were known and valuated by the citizens. Secondly, it alludes to either the existence or the lack of correlations between the candidates’ subjective/social/reputational/opinion records and their achievements in the personal competence, partisan and mediatic domains.