Anonymity in political representation: building a theory

My research project concerns the notion of anonymity of representation (i.e. the degree of identifiability - or lack thereof - of a political candidate to voters) and aims to answer the following research question:

"What are the potential effects of the enforcement of different forms of anonymity of representation (through institutional reforms and/or legal constraints) on the quality of candidates and electoral processes?"

Drawing on the methods of political theory, and studies of democratic institutional design, the goal is to test the limits of openness and transparency as democratic ideals and to ask whether democracy and anonymity can be bed-fellows beyond the limited implementation of anonymity at the ballot boxes, and whether anonymity can benefit both deliberation and democratic representation. These are questions motivated by political developments seen everywhere around us, like the growing "personalisation" of politics and the dissemination of an ideology of "intimacy" which might threaten the very possibility of democratic scrutiny.

So far, the academic literature that addresses anonymity and its effects on politics in democratic societies has focused almost exclusively on the anonymity of common citizens and voters, taking the public status of political candidates as an unchangeable constant. The public nature of political candidates, however, is in tension with the widespread belief, among citizens, that voters should vote not for candidates but rather for the political ideas and projects they represent, or at most for the candidates' status as members of a particular minority or social category.

Numerous empirical studies point to the fact that voters' choice is greatly influenced by personal, non-political traits of candidates such as charisma, status, appearance, face, voice and body language. These can have a sufficiently high impact on voters' behaviour to sway elections. This occurs in a political environment in which competence matters less than in the past and candidates' antisocial traits such as low levels of agreeableness and emotional stability are positively correlated with electoral success. Notwithstanding, the public status of candidates is rarely challenged in peer-reviewed literature, scholars of the public sphere have generally paid little attention to anonymity, and even less to anonymity in the context of political representation.

Given the lack of scholarship explicitly addressing anonymity in political representation, the research I plan to carry out is exploratory in nature. My first step will be to create a typology that crosses the various forms of anonymity with different electoral processes.
Since anonymity and identifiability exist in a continuum, anonymity of representation does not
necessarily mean that all information about candidates is inaccessible to voters.
For example, in the context of public speeches and political debates, anonymity of representation could mean that when a candidate talks publicly, their face is concealed (visual anonymity), that what they say is associated with their identity as party candidates while their individual identity is kept hidden (personal anonymity), or that their real name is not known (pseudonymity).
At the ballot boxes, it could mean that voters vote for a candidate's political statements instead of for the candidate themselves, without a label that makes the connection between statements and candidate explicit to voters.
Anonymity of representation could also be implemented through a legal requirement for parties to select their most prominent candidates after and not before elections.

Methodologically, I will take both a normative approach (analysing various anonymity of representation types under the criteria of desirability, feasibility and legitimacy) and a comparative one. The latter will include the analysis of historical cases before and after the advent of personalising media.