In a context of greater personalization of politics, the evaluation of individual political leaders by voters might play an increasing role in the process of political accountability. However, at the same time, today it is common to assume that voters can only exercise an imperfect or “blind retrospection”, which might impair said accountability. Is the evaluation of political leaders just “blind retrospection”, or are voters capable of rationally updating their attitudes about politicians? What is the relevance of the evaluation of individual politicians for electoral behavior? If voters fail to update their attitudes towards individual politicians in response to their performance, the link between evaluations and accountability will be broken. This panel aims to advance our understanding about how individuals evaluate political leaders, as well as about the causes and consequences of such evaluations. We welcome papers focusing on topics such as: knowledge and name recognition of politicians; the traits that individuals value the most and least in political leaders; the foundations and heuristics individuals rely on when evaluating politicians; the role of contextual factors and politicians’ decisions in shaping leaders’ evaluations; the consequences of evaluations for political behavior. We particularly encourage submissions that rely on a quasi-experimental or experimental research designs.