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Personalization of National Election Campaigns
Abstract
The empirical evidence concerning the ‘personalization of politics' thesis is, at best, mixed. The analysis of a new data-set on the media coverage of national elections in six Western European countries serves to reinforce this overall rather sceptical conclusion. The analysis shows that, in the national elections in the six countries covered (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom [UK]), there is no general trend to increasing personalization or increasing concentration of the media coverage on a limited set of particularly visible personalities. Among the six countries, the exception to this overall assessment is the Netherlands, where we find both a trend towards increasing personalization and increasing concentration of the public attention on a limited set of personalities. Rather than an increasing level of personalization, what we generally observe are large country-specific differences in the overall degree of personalization and of the concentration of attention on the top candidates.
... In presidential systems, which grant a very important role to candidates in the first place, personalization is a viable strategy and should happen often (Adam and Maier, 2010;Pappi and Shikano, 2001) Evidence from parliamentary systems on the other hand is somewhat mixed (see Adam and Maier, 2010, for a good overview of different studies on the subject). For example, Kriesi (2012) looks at personalization trends in six European countries and finds that only in the Netherlands does an increase of personalization over time occur. There is no general trend apparent in the other five countries. ...
... While the longevity of Dutch governments has been increasing compared to the early 1990s and earlier (Timmermans and Moury, 2006), the system still appears less stable than the German one, where early termination does not occur nearly as frequently. Another point in favor of comparing Germany and the Netherlands over a similar time frame is the study by Kriesi (2012), where he finds an increase of personalization over time for the Netherlands only, while the results for Germany are inconclusive. It is interesting to see whether a similar trend to the one observed by Kriesi (2012) holds, i.e. whether the Netherlands is a more eager adopter of personalization than Germany. ...
... Another point in favor of comparing Germany and the Netherlands over a similar time frame is the study by Kriesi (2012), where he finds an increase of personalization over time for the Netherlands only, while the results for Germany are inconclusive. It is interesting to see whether a similar trend to the one observed by Kriesi (2012) holds, i.e. whether the Netherlands is a more eager adopter of personalization than Germany. ...
Welche Kommunikationsstrategien benutzen Koalitionsparteien während ihrer Zeit im Amt? Koalitionsparteien stehen vor einem Dilemma, dass sie zwar nach aussen Einheit demonstrieren sollen, sich aber gleichzeitig von ihren Partnern differenzieren müssen. Ich argumentiere, dass politische Kommunikation eine wichtige Rolle dabei spielt, wie Parteien versuchen, ihr individuelles Profil zu erhalten. Dazu habe ich drei Hauptstrategien definiert, die Parteien benutzen können. Basierend auf einem Datensatz von über 35'000 deutschen und niederländischen Pressemitteilungen von Koalitionsparteien analysiere ich, was Parteien in ihrer Strategiewahl beeinflusst. Meine Resultate zeigen, dass Personalisierung, definiert als ein verstärkter Fokus auf Individuen, davon beeinflusst wird, wie stark sich Koalitionsparteien ideologisch unterscheiden. Ich benutze einen supervised classification algorithm, um die deutschen Pressemitteilungen in verschiedene thematische Kategorien zu klassifizieren. Ich nutze diese Klassifizierung um zu analysieren, ob Parteien während dem Wahlkampf einen besonderen Fokus auf die Themen legen, die ihnen wichtig sind. Dies ist nicht der Fall, und meine Analysen zeigen, dass Parteien kurz vor einer Wahl sogar einen geringeren Schwerpunkt auf diese Themen legen, ungeachtet ideologischer Differenzen zwischen ihnen und ihren Koalitionspartnern. Schließlich analysiere ich die Präsenz von negativem Campaigning in deutschen Pressemitteilungen und in einer Auswahl von Episoden einer politischen Talkshow. Im Falle der Pressemitteilungen stelle ich fest, dass die Parteien mit zunehmender Wahrscheinlichkeit "feindlich gesinnte" Politiker erwähnen, je näher die Wahl rückt, und dass diese Erwähnungen mit einem generell negativerem sentiment der betreffenden Pressemitteilungen korrelieren.
... We also consider movements' material and symbolic resources (McAdam, McCarthy & Zald, 1996, p. 3) as they constrain how movements can respond to different opportunities (Koopmans et al., 2005, p. 21). More recently, social movement scholars have highlighted the importance of grievances (Kriesi, 2012;della Porta, 2015). In the shadow of the economic and financial crisis of 2008, popular grievances have fed into electoral and protest mobilisations (della Porta, 2015). ...
... movement and counter-movement dynamics, della Porta & Diani, 2006), issues and grievances. Radical right organisations in CEE use a wide repertoire of actions, ranging from electoral strategies to violence, which varies across time and countries, depending on the relevant combination of grievances, opportunities, and organisational factors (Kriesi, 2012). ...
The radical right is on the rise all over Europe and beyond, either in terms of electoral success or activities outside the institutional arena, especially after the 2015 refugee crisis. Central and Eastern European countries are no exception, although not yet closely studied for radical right social movements and protest. In this article we investigate the degree and characteristics of the mobilisation of different types of radical right organisations (political parties and social movements alike) in Central and Eastern Europe to capture a broader picture of the current developments in radical right politics beyond elections and electoral campaign periods. By focusing on four countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), and combining qualitative and quantitative data derived from a protest event analysis reported in newspaper articles between 2008 and 2016 (for a total of 1587 events coded), we analyse the radical right mobilisation (i.e. intensity and degree of radicalism), linking it to the political opportunities and the organisational features of the groups mobilising. We argue that the radical right is using a very broad repertoire of action, beyond violence and the electoral arena, including expressive and symbolic strategies, as well as the use of new technologies like the Internet. We also stress that for the radical right, as for the leftwing social movements, the analytical framework of political opportunities and a resource mobilisation approach can help in explaining their mobilisation.
... În același timp, nu putem subestima și nici nu putem exclude faptul că procesul de construcție a imaginii ia forma unui trunchi comun. De ce? Pentru că îmbină principii și elemente din domenii conexe: 1. trăsături de personalitate ale brandurilor politice: personalizare politică, leadership și stil de conducere politică (Bennett, 2012, p. 38;Karnoven, 2010;Kriesi, 2012;Northouse, 2016;Kellerman, 2018); 2. elemente de etică politică: valori de brand și principii (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000, p. 85); 3. management strategic: discursul politic ca strategie de clădire a imaginii ( van Djik, 1980, p. 171) și 4. principii din mixul de comunicare, publicitate și marketing -ca strategii de promovare a brandurilor (Zamora, 2010, p. 284;Cwalina, Falkowsky & Newman, 2015, p. 8). ...
... Rămânând în zona dezbaterilor legate de valori de brand (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000, p. 13), principii și conduită politică, scopul celui de-al treilea capitol este acela de a defini conceptul de imagine politică/ personalizare politică. Pe această direcție, autori precum: Karnoven (2010), Kriesi (2012), Van Aelst, Sheafer & Stanyer (2012), Iyengar & Kinder (1987) evidențiază caracterul dinamic al brandului politic, pentru a sugera o posibilă re(valorificare) a relației dintre cei doi agenți sociali (Norlin, 2021, p. 136) brand politic-public. Astfel, cercetătorii își propun restabilirea pozitivă a conceptului de imagine politică (Cwalina et al., 2015, p. 133), părăsind semnificațiile tranzacționale aflate în subordinea abordărilor din paradigma pozitivistă. ...
... Although studies of voting behavior repeatedly explore the impact of personalized politics, we know little about individual candidates' capacity to mobilize people to turn out in elections. The personalization thesis posits that contemporary politics increasingly revolves around individual candidates, impacting voter behavior across Western democracies (Kriesi, 2012;McAllister, 2007). The literature attributes the personalization of politics to two societal processes: mediatization and partisan dealignment (McAllister, 2007). ...
... Although the results show signs of increased personalized electoral participation in recent elections, the main conclusion is that candidate influence is neither a new phenomenon nor exclusive to voters without partisan loyalties. This finding aligns with the empirical literature on personalized politics (e.g., Aarts et al., 2011;Karvonen, 2010;King, 2002;Kriesi, 2012) and underscores the need for leader effect studies to pose new questions. Particularly critical is exploring the psychological mechanisms underlying why merely approving a candidate's qualities is often insufficient to mobilize voters, while polarized perceptions consistently drive voter turnout across all voter groups. ...
The personalization thesis claims that leaders’ influence over voters has increased. While research consistently shows that candidates influence party choice, we know little about their effects on the prior decision to turn out in elections. This article represents the first study to examine the relationship between candidate trait evaluations and turnout decisions in the American context and the first longitudinal study of the phenomenon. The study utilizes ANES data to test three hypotheses drawn from theories on electoral participation and personalized politics in U.S. presidential elections between 1980 and 2020. The results show that while trait evaluations of Republican candidates consistently affect turnout, perceptions of Democratic candidates’ competence mobilize voters in specific elections. Moreover, individual polarization promotes turnout, particularly among partisan dealigned voters with different perceptions of the candidates’ competence. The results indicate a personalization of electoral participation that can benefit civic engagement and democratic quality.
... First, indirect elections reduce the incentives of prime ministerial candidates to cultivate direct ties with voters. General election campaigns, in turn, tend to emphasize party links and platforms over the attributes of individual candidates (Kriesi, 2012). Second, citizens cannot split their ticket and vote for a prime ministerial candidate while voting against their party and, thus, are less likely to give initial approval to an executive from a party or coalition for which they did not vote (Samuels & Shugart, 2010). ...
... Declining partisan attachments across parliamentary democracies contribute to this trend by reducing voters' reliance on party cues and increasing their reliance on candidates' personal traits (McAllister, 2007). In sum, although evidence of personalization in parliamentary regimes is mixed (Campus & Pasquino, 2006;Dowding, 2013;Kriesi, 2012;McAllister, 2007), we can expect approval dynamics in parliamentary regimes with high levels of personalism to approximate those of presidential regimes. ...
Does the type of democratic regime matter for public evaluations of leaders? We argue two characteristics intrinsic to presidential and parliamentary regimes lead to divergent patterns of executive approval. For presidents, direct elections foster more personal leader-voter linkages; for prime ministers, dependence on the legislature for survival contributes to more institutionalized party systems. These two mechanisms should generate higher approval at the outset of a term—larger honeymoons— for presidents than for prime ministers, but also more rapid decline. Analyses of data from 40 countries produce evidence consistent with these constitutionally-based distinctions. Yet we uncover important within-regime differences. Within presidential systems, approval patterns vary along with paths to power—first-election versus re-election, and elected versus unelected. Within parliamentarism, honeymoons are greater for prime ministers overseeing single-party majoritarian governments. Study findings advance long-standing debates about the relative merits of presidential and parliamentary systems—particularly the tradeoff between democratic responsiveness and stability.
... Modern political campaigns often focus on personal characteristics and language use rather than substantive arguments (Joly et al. 2019;Garzia et al. 2021), which is associated with the personalization of politics (Van Aelst et al. 2011;Van Santen and Van Zoonen 2009;Kriesi 2011). This way, studies indicate that politicians devote much of their electoral discourse to presenting their personal image (Benoit and McHale 2003). ...
... This study examines the trend toward increasing personalization in political communication, which emphasizes the person behind the politician and personal characteristics to build an interesting public persona (Kriesi 2011). The study analyzed data from the 2016 and 2020 US presidential election campaigns to determine the characteristics that presidential candidates emphasized in their self-presentation during speeches, commercials, interviews, and debates. ...
Politicians often mention their personality traits when communicating with the public that aligns with the concept of impression management ( Benoit and McHale 2003 ). This suggests that politicians can use their personalities to create a favorable image during election campaigns ( Van Santen and Van Zoonen 2010 ). However, previous research has not adequately incorporated personality theories into the study of impression management ( Clifford 2018 ). Addressing this gap, our study examines how presidential candidates presented themselves during the 2016 and 2020 US elections, and explores the personality traits emphasized in campaign communication. Our research combines qualitative and quantitative methods and diverse data sources, including political commercials and speeches. This study contributes to the field by incorporating personality theories into the study of political impression management.
... Individualized content focuses on individual politicians, while parties as abstract organizations are in the background. Individualization is further divided into a general visibility of political persons and a concentrated visibility of a few leading politicians (presidentialism) (Kriesi, 2012;van Aelst et al., 2012). The second subtype of personalization, privatization, reveals the private context of a political person to present him or her as an ordinary person. ...
... Yet, although it was assumed that social media channels would promote privatization in the representation of politics, empirical findings show that politicians tend to use background stories sparingly (Bast, 2021a, p. 19;Farkas & Bene, 2021, p. 132;Filimonov et al., 2016, p. 7;Liebhart & Bernhardt, 2017, p. 20). (Adam & Maier, 2010), e.g., in France, the USA, Austria, the UK (but not Canada) (McAllister, 2007), and Israel (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007), other studies show mixed results in international comparisons (Karvonen, 2010;Maurer & Engelmann, 2014) or cannot prove a personalization or individualization trend over time in Western countries (Kriesi, 2012;Maurer & Engelmann, 2014). For election coverage in Germany, the country of focus in this article, it can be shown that since the 1980s up to threefourths of quality newspaper articles on elections refer to at least one of the top candidates. ...
The increased use of social media has triggered a visual shift in digital political communication. One central strategy is visual (self-) personalization and many studies have analyzed why and to what extent political communication is focused on individuals. Yet, most research has concentrated on personalization, leaving aside the question of whether it comes at the expense of policy issues or whether people are brought into focus as facilitators of such issues. We fill this research gap by analyzing how visual (self-) personalization on Instagram pages of parties and politicians during election campaigns has changed over time and whether it comes at the cost of addressing policy issues. We use data from three quantitative content analyses of Instagram posts published by parliamentary parties (n = 7) and top candidates (n = 18) in the “hot phases” before three national German elections (N = 2,313), covering all nationwide elections since Instagram has become a common campaign tool. It is shown that personal depictions are very common in Instagram campaigns of parties and candidates while addressing policy issues in posts varies between elections. Using a multilevel binomial regression model, we show that addressing policy issues is negatively related to personalization but further analysis shows that it is not a zero-sum game at the cost of addressing policy issues. Our results provide insights into how the presentation of politics might change when image- and video-based platforms continue to gain importance in political communication.
... A large scholarship on candidate evaluations and leader effects shows that party preferences and vote choice are influenced by voters' assessment of the political candidate (e.g., Bittner, 2011;Garzia, 2013;Lobo & Curtice, 2014;Mughan, 2000). The exact scope of this impact is debated and, for instance, it is argued to be dependent on political institutions (e.g., Curtice & Hunjan, 2013), partisan de-alignment (e.g., Kriesi, 2012), or time-for instance, some research on the personalization of politics states that the strength of the impact of the perceptions of candidates on the vote decision has increased over time (e.g., Garzia et al., 2020;Hayes & McAllister, 1997;McAllister, 2007; but see also Clarke et al., 2004;King, 2002;Nadeau & Nevitte, 2013). That notwithstanding, the underlying claim that voter's evaluations of candidates affect their party preferences and voting behavior is hardly disputed. ...
p>It is well known that voters’ evaluation of candidates on leadership traits influences their overall candidate assessment and vote choice (i.e., leader effects). It remains unclear, however, whether positive or negative leader trait evaluations are most influential. We argue that especially in current-day political reality—in which ideological and affective polarization are skyrocketing and the political climate is fueled with negativity, high levels of incivility, and negative campaigning—the negative leader effects outweigh the positive ones. Moreover, we expect this negativity bias in leader effects to be conditioned by partisanship and political dissatisfaction. To test these expectations, we triangulate multiple studies. First, we use data from a multi-country election survey to examine the relation between perceived leadership traits of real candidates and party preferences, providing observational evidence from the US, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Second, focusing on the causal mechanism, we test the negativity bias in a survey experiment among American voters. Here, we manipulate how leadership traits (competence, leadership, integrity, empathy) of a fictitious candidate are presented in terms of valence (positive, negative), and test the impact of these cues on voters’ candidate evaluations and vote choices. The findings indicate, as predicted, that negative leader effects influence voters most strongly. Thus, the role of party leaders is mainly a push instead of a pull factor in elections. Additionally, we show that partisanship and political dissatisfaction seem relevant only for candidate evaluations, not for vote choice. This article pushes the field of candidate evaluations forward by examining the dynamics of the negativity bias in leader effects in an era of negative politics.</p
... Personalization in media is most commonly operationalized through content analysis. First, the proportion of verbal and visual representations of individual politicians can be established as an indicator of both centralized and decentralized personalization, as well as of privatization (Kriesi, 2012). Counting mentions or images of individual politicians and comparing the result to the total number of political images affords a percentage measure of personalized verbal and visual representations, albeit considering some important nuances, such as counting mentions in an article title twice, to factor in a larger exposure (Vliegenthart et al., 2011). ...
In the fields of political science and political communication, considerable research attention has been devoted to political personalization, a phenomenon whereby politicians become the main anchor in interpreting and evaluating the political process. While the personalization of politics has indeed become a hallmark of contemporary democracies, the phenomenon itself is by no means new. Historically, political power has long been identified with individuals, as is elaborated in the 1957 classic work The King’s Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz. In his studies of the historical development of social and political orders, Max Weber identifies, as one of the three main forms of political legitimacy, what he termed “charismatic authority,” which is based on a leader’s personal charisma. Similarly, studies of the early phases of representative democracies have emphasized that, during that time, political representation largely centered on personal factors rather than on nationally identifiable collective interests and loyalties. This personalization process has gained momentum in Western liberal democracies as of the second half of the 20th century, and the 21st century is expected to see a continuation of that trend.
Three basic types of political personalization are institutional, media, and behavioral. The first pertains to the shifting focus from collective bodies, such as parties and other political entities, to individual politicians within governments. The second entails a growing concentration of media attention on individual politicians as opposed to parties, institutions, or policy issues, while the latter is anchored in politicians’ conduct and voters’ electoral behavior.
An important distinction that has been increasingly developed in the literature is between personalization and privatization; the latter, sometimes termed intimization , is considered a subcategory of the former. Personalization refers to focus on a public figure’s political activities, whereas privatization refers to focus on their personal life. In the context of political campaigns, privatization involves strategies that emphasize candidates’ personal attributes over their and their parties’ political suitability, achievements, and goals.
Personalization influences not only voters and politicians but also international perceptions, and they can enhance engagement and trust by humanizing politics. However, it also risks simplifying complex issues, fostering polarization and undermining trust in political institutions over time. Thus, the study of political personalization is essential for understanding its significant impact in various forms and spheres.
... The diffusion of ideas in real or online social networks is strongly influenced by human emotions, making memes one of the most powerful tools in the fast spreading of information (Beskow et al., 2020;McLoughlin & Southern, 2021). Emotions can alter political behavior and matter in voting decisions (Kriesi, 2012). Brader (2005) argues that if candidates add music and images in their political campaign ads, they could significantly alter the motivational and persuasive power of these ads. ...
This article explores the influence of memes on political discourse and public opinion during the 2019 Romanian presidential elections. Focusing on memes related to candidates Klaus Iohannis and Viorica Dãncilã, the article highlights the dual role of memes: as entertainment and as tools for framing political narratives in a biased manner. Employing content analysis, the article offers a view over the types of memes that emerged during the 2019 Romanian presidential elections, emphasizing the representation of the two front-runner candidates: Klaus Iohannis and Viorica Dãncilã. Generally, memes of both candidates were negative in tone with Iohannis more likely to be framed in terms of his funny and humorous situations and Dãncilã in terms of her low intellectual qualities. The article calls for further exploration into the strategic use of memes in politics, aiming to grasp their impact on shaping public perceptions and narratives in the upcoming 2024 elections.
... This shifts the focus of citizens from debates over institutions, to discussions about the personality traits of politicians. Some political systems even favor the attention on politicians -as is the case in the USA and France (Kriesi, 2012). But neither is the situation new for Eastern Europe, which for many years has experienced the "presidentialization" of politics (Krouwel 2000). ...
Understanding populism as a communication strategy (Aalberg et al. 2017) that is based on both messages and styles (Engesser et. al., 2017), the present research investigates the populist elements of political discourses articulating the subject of "corruption" in the context of the attempts to change the anti-corruption legislation by the Romanian government in 2017-2018. Based on audience preferences and on the density of political communication conducted by both political and media actors, the study conducted content analysis articles from three major Romanian TV-related news portals during February 2017 and May 1-June 5, 2018 (N=548). In addition, computer-assisted content analysis was performed on social media posts of political parties (N=875) and the posts of their leaders (N=540). The research not only identified elements of populist political communication both in the content and the style of corruption-discourses but also reflected the polarization of the Romanian media system.
... Studiile anterioare arată că schimbările suferite de partidele politice în ultimele decenii au încurajat rolul liderilor individuali în influențarea percepției alegătorilor asupra identității partidului și, în cele din urmă, asupra modului în care votează (Garzia, 2017;Lobo, 2008). De asemenea, analize ale campaniilor electorale moderne au subliniat creșterea vizibilității liderilor politici în detrimentul vizibilității partidelor pe care le conduc (Garzia, 2017;Kriesi, 2012). ...
... Zájem o jednotlivce, jeho výkony a psychologické motivy proto lépe odpovídá logice zábavy a jejích žánrů než procesy, mocenské struktury či abstraktní společenský vývoj, což je současně důvodem pro to, že politici musí střídavě naplňovat požadavky zábavy a politické logiky, aby si (i do budoucna) zachovali jak vztah ke každodennímu životu a podporu ze strany voličů, tak své pozice na politickém kolbišti. Dalšími významný-mi zdroji (mediální) personalizace politiky jsou individualizace (Beck, 2007), eroze tradičních společenských konfliktních linií (Kriesi, 2012) a mediatizace politiky (Caprara, Zimbardo, 2004). ...
... on individual politicians to make their political coverage more appealing (Kriesi, 2011). Those political leaders, who are eager for personal publicity and soft coverage, may benefit from personalization (Langer, 2007), as may parties, who find it easier to convey messages through individuals with whom voters identify (McAllister, 2015). ...
Personalization of politics is a well-established field of research, yet not much is known about how the phenomenon has been influenced by the increased use of social media as a tool for political communication. In this research we analyze media personalization in newspapers and on social media posts of parties and party leaders during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections. Combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis, we find that a) personalized content was more common in newspapers than on social media, and b) the contexts of personalized content were largely similar regardless of media type, suggesting it may be more relevant to speak of “hybrid media personalization” rather than “traditional media personalization” and “social media personalization”. These findings are linked to broader discussions on personalization of politics and the use of social media as a political communication tool.
... Although much research has examined the long-term dynamics of campaign communications -for example, whether campaigns have become more personalized over time (Kriesi, 2012) -campaigns can also change in the very short term. Campaigns often need to be adapted to changing circumstances, such as changes in polls or because the opponent has changed their strategy (see, for example, Hartman et al, 2017). ...
Germany is a prime example of a country where the use of gender-sensitive language is the subject of public controversy and debate. This study provides a quantitative content analysis of all ( N = 72) German televised debates aired on the federal and state level from 1997 until 2022 to explore the determinants of the use of gender-sensitive language by political candidates. We find that the use of gender-sensitive language has increased over time, but the effect is small and not robust. Party affiliation correlates with candidates’ linguistic behaviour, indicating that conservative candidates use less gender-sensitive language. Candidates’ gender and party affiliation, as well as parties’ socio-political positions, interact in predicting the use of gender-sensitive language. Candidates also change their use of gender-sensitive language from one debate to another. Compared to liberal/left-wing candidates, these changes are less likely to be associated with an increase in gender-sensitive language for conservative candidates.
... a growing body of literature on the so called "personalization of politics"25 . range of empirical phenomena that are related to one another in one particular feature: "the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group <...> declines"26 . ...
The original concept of soft power embraced the belief that culture, values and foreign policy practice are the basic resources upon which this type power is based. This article argues that popular national leaders can also – maybe even more so – be treated as soft power resources as their popularity and trustworthiness go hand in hand with the positive public opinion about their countries abroad. This hypothesis is tested against survey data collected from all over the globe by the U.S.-based polling institute Pew Research Center over the last two decades. The data shows a strong positive correlation between the public confidence in a leader and the view of their country abroad in almost every case that was examined. The view of a country among foreign audiences often changes with the change of its top leadership. The results of this reseach cast doubt on whether national culture and values rather than national leaders are the preeminent source of soft power of any given country in international politics.
... The greater moral weight attributed by participants to personal characteristics of policymakers may be seen as reflecting the overall personalization of politics -the longobserved trend of media coverage, election campaigns and voting behavior being more focused on the individual politicians' competence, leadership, credibility, morality, etc. compared to political parties and institutions (Van Aelstet al., 2012;Kriesi, 2012;Rahat & Kenig, 2018). In addition, an institutional factor that could encourage person-focused blame generating in British government blame games is the principle of ministerial responsibilitythe constitutional convention of the Westminster parliamentary system that each minister is personally responsible to the parliament for their own actions as well as those of their department (see, e.g., Hinterleitner & Sager, 2015). ...
This article introduces an original theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people’s perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person’s character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a “retweetability paradox”—in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted.
... Research of politicians' use of social media has focused particularly on identity construction and the self-representation level (e.g., DePaula, et al., 2018;Stier et al., 2018), and studies have been devoted to the use of the Internet by politicians during elections and for campaigning (e.g., Enli, 2017;Kriesi, 2012;Stier et al., 2018). Research from national Norwegian campaigns ten years ago found that political candidates reported more idealistic motivations for democratic dialogue concerning their social media use than they managed to manoeuvre in practice; that politicians have and are expected to have a personal presence on social media; and that for some, it represents yet another marketing tool (Enli & Skogerbø, 2013). ...
This article contributes to the literature on political agenda-setting on social media in the local context. Using interviews with local politicians in northern Norway, we discuss local politicians’ use of social media for agenda-setting in between elections from an agency perspective. We ask whether local politicians seek to promote and control the definition of an issue on social media, and whether local politicians are influenced by citizens’ opinions on these platforms. We find that local politicians do take advantage of social media in the agenda-setting process, both for problem definition and to sell their ideas. Our findings reveal that local politicians use social media to bypass traditional media for political messaging and that they are sensitive to public opinion on Facebook. Furthermore, there is evidence in our study of online debates brought into formal policymaking processes.
... Una de las operacionalizaciones más claras y contrastadas para medir la personalización en la cobertura periodística es la propuesta por van Aelst et al. (2012, p.212). Estos autores estudian el nivel de personalización de la información política (en la línea propuesta por Kriesi (2012) y Kaase, 1994)), contabilizando las menciones que se realizan tanto a los actores políticos (factores/dimensiones personales) como a los partidos o instituciones en los que se encuadran estos actores (factor o dimensión institucional de la personalización). Esto es algo preferible a codificar solamente si el foco principal del artículo es la persona o la institución (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007), ya que así se puede analizar el número de menciones de una dimensión respecto a la otra. ...
El análisis del uso de la personalización en los contenidos periodísticos de los escándalos de corrupción política es escaso. De ahí el objetivo de la presente investigación: estudiar su uso como estrategia político-editorial de los medios impresos y digitales españoles cuando se trata de cubrir escándalos. El análisis se realiza a partir de la medición de distintas variables ideadas por Just y Crigler (2019) y por Van Aelst et al. (2012) aplicadas a un estudio de caso: los escándalos del rey emérito Juan Carlos I. Para ello, se realiza un análisis de contenido cuantitativo de 334 piezas publicadas por cinco diarios. Los resultados muestran que las responsabilidades se atribuyen principalmente al rey emérito y no a la institución monárquica, aunque las diferencias entre medios son relevantes en función de su línea editorial. elDiario.es y El Español son los que dan mayor cabida a la atribución de responsabilidades a la monarquía.
... On the Y-axis is the number of mentions of the politician while the X-axis has the number of mentions of different political issues, parties or countries. It is taken for granted that both variables correlate negatively (Kriesi 2012;Lengauer and Winder 2013). Evidence is not conclusive to maintain this idea (Wilke and Reinemann 2001;Rahat and Sheafer 2007). ...
... Although it is often stated that personalization is a core and undisputable trend in contemporary politics, studies are divided between those who prove that politics has been personalized over the last decades (Garzia, 2012;Renwick and Pilet, 2016;McAllister, 2007), and those demonstrating that there is no clear evidence of such a universal evolution Karvonen, 2010;Kriesi, 2012;Marino et al., 2022). These contradictory results could be linked to the fact that personalization is a broad concept covering a wide variety of practices and evolutions. ...
Personalization refers to a shift over time in attention and/or power from collective actors to individuals. I focus on personalization in voting behavior, measured by the use of preference voting in flexible list-PR systems. I will argue that in a multi-level context this kind of personalization can take place at different policy levels, which could influence each other. In local elections, voters can be attracted by the mayor and/or other local figureheads, but also by the national party leader and/or national politicians figuring on the local list. Therefore, scholars should not only focus on the number and importance of people to which personalization applies (‘person level’ of personalization), but also on how processes at one policy level impact on other policy levels (‘territorial level’ of personalization). By combining literature on intra-party competition and personalization on the one hand, and on electoral patterns in multi-level states on the other, I engage in a conceptual discussion about the nature of personalization. I add empirical evidence to this conceptual discussion by analyzing preference voting patterns in local elections in Flanders (Belgium). As such, we gain more insights in the remarkable decline of preference voting that took place there.
... Gerade die Politikberichterstattung mit nationaler Relevanz wird durch die Ausgestaltung des jeweiligen politischen Systems beeinflusst. Als relevant für die inhaltliche Vielfalt erachten wir, dass Deutschland und Österreich trotz Konsensorientie rung auch Elemente von Konkurrenzdemokratien mit klareren Rollen von Regierung und Opposition aufweisen, während in der Schweiz die Konsensdemokratie ausgeprägter ist und die Macht sich stärker zwischen Exekutive und Parlament aufteilt (Kriesi, 2012). Zudem ist die Schweiz -anders als die repräsentativen Demokratien Deutschland und Österreicheine halbdirekte Demokratie mit relativ großen direkten Beteiligungschancen für die Wahl bevölkerung und damit auch für nicht-etablierte, zivilgesellschaftliche Akteur:innen, was sich ebenfalls in den Medieninhalten niederschlägt (Höglinger, 2008). ...
Vielfalt als zentrale Schlüsselnorm der Medienregulierung prägt die Debatte um den Funktionsauftrag von öffentlich-rechtlichen Medien (ÖRM). Denn mediale Vielfalt gilt als normative Voraussetzung für freie Meinungsbildung und betont damit die demokratiestützende Aufgabe von ÖRM. Mit Blick auf verschiedene Demokratiemodelle und strukturelle Rahmenbedingungen wird Vielfalt als Qualitätsdimension allerdings bislang empirisch – gerade in vergleichender Perspektive – nur vereinzelt analysiert. Dieser Beitrag überprüft mit einer manuellen quantitativen Inhaltsanalyse von fast 6.000 Beiträgen der Politikberichterstattung mit nationalem Bezug, wie vielfältig die Hauptnachrichtensendungen der ÖRM auf ihren traditionellen und Online-Kanälen in Deutschland, Österreich und der deutschsprachigen Schweiz und im Vergleich zu anderen Nachrichtenangeboten sind. Die Resultate zeigen geringe Unterschiede zwischen Offline- und Online-Kanälen und zwischen den Medientypen. Themen- und Akteursvielfalt sind relativ hoch, mit Einschränkungen durch den Fokus auf Akteure der Exekutive. Gleichzeitig reflektiert die Berichterstattung politische Systeme und Demokratiemodelle; entsprechend fällt der Fokus auf die Exekutive im liberal-repräsentativen Modell in Deutschland am stärksten aus, während die stärkere Präsenz von Parlament und organisierter Zivilgesellschaft in der Schweiz eher dem deliberativen Modell entspricht.
... mass burn. This was triggered by mass suspicion of the election organizers not open to the public in vote counting (Kriesi, 2012). ...
One objective of the state is to create stability and prosperity for its people. To achieve this objective requires leader who have the capacity and integrity to accomplish the state walfare. In electoral context, one of the goals of the election is to elect a qualified leader, but the goals of fair election precisely have their own contrains, particularly conflict potentials that often occur in every election in Indonesia. In South Sulawesi, in particular, the conflict potential during the election frequently occurs in communities, which leads to friction at the elite level, so that the goals of peaceful and fair election are often far from the objectives of the public election laws.
... promotion of such campaign message themes is consistent with existing studies suggesting the importance of personal image(Kriesi 2012;Seawright 2013), political agenda(Nadeau et al. 2010;Levine et al. 2011;Charteris-Black 2006;Chin 2016;Gascoigne 2008), and celebrity endorsements(Lindsay 2005;Frederick 1982;Bodden 2005;Rojek 2001;Henneberg & Chen 2008;Mishra & Mishra 2014) in contemporary election campaigns. The following sub-sections further analyze the key topics on the three themes and the impacts of messages with such themes upon the empowerment of political life of the constituents and democracy in the country during the election period.5.1.1. ...
This research scrutinized the use of social media in the 2014 presidential election in Indonesia. In particular it analyzed their role to empower democracy due to their capacity to encourage the constituents to engage in public debates on political issues and to make informed voting decisions. Incorporating theories on mediapolis, celebrity, and intermedia agenda setting as well as employing content analysis as analytical tools, it explored the coexistence and interactions of social media, celebrity, and traditional media power in the election and how such accounts had implications on the capacity of social media to empower democracy in the country.
... It is tempting to treat newspapers as a constant entity in order to study changes happening in other fields, although their very materiality is constantly affected by changes specific to the media field. Quantitative studies assessing the mediatization of election campaigns in post-war Switzerland, for instance, have a hard time assessing whether their increased media coverage related to their growing importance for political actors or whether it (also) resulted from changes in the media itselfwith the increased dramatisation and personalization of politics on television, but also the new narrative strategies of new party-independent newspapers and magazines from the 1960s onwards (Udris, 2013, 6; see also Udris et al., 2015;Kriesi, 2012). By increasingly covering campaigns, journalists also asserted their autonomy vis-à-vis politicians, who were in parallel professionalising their political communication with the help of emerging experts in "public relations". ...
This contribution discusses the potentials and challenges of using digitised newspapers as a source in relation to other newspaper collections, digitised or not. The author argues that digitisation makes the pitfall of media-centrism even more visible and calls for an even more careful contextualisation of media sources. Instead of focusing too narrowly on a sample of seemingly “representative” digitised newspapers, digitisation may in fact invite us to multiply the types of sources and perspectives we include in our research. Dealing with such diverse sources, both digitized and non-digitized, requires that we highlight how we think about, construct, and analyse our corpus. Ultimately, digitisation can lead to a more exploratory and iterative research approach and thus an understanding of the research corpus as an evolving, interconnected, and reflexive collection of diverse sources.
... It is tempting to treat newspapers as a constant entity in order to study changes happening in other fields, although their very materiality is constantly affected by changes specific to the media field. Quantitative studies assessing the mediatization of election campaigns in post-war Switzerland, for instance, have a hard time assessing whether their increased media coverage related to their growing importance for political actors or whether it (also) resulted from changes in the media itselfwith the increased dramatisation and personalization of politics on television, but also the new narrative strategies of new party-independent newspapers and magazines from the 1960s onwards (Udris, 2013, 6; see also Udris et al., 2015;Kriesi, 2012). By increasingly covering campaigns, journalists also asserted their autonomy vis-à-vis politicians, who were in parallel professionalising their political communication with the help of emerging experts in "public relations". ...
This contribution discusses the potentials and challenges of using digitised newspapers as a source in relation to other newspaper collections, digitised or not. The author argues that digitisation makes the pitfall of media-centrism even more visible and calls for an even more careful contextualisation of media sources. Instead of focusing too narrowly on a sample of seemingly “representative” digitised newspapers, digitisation may in fact invite us to multiply the types of sources and perspectives we include in our research. Dealing with such diverse sources, both digitized and non-digitized, requires that we highlight how we think about, construct, and analyse our corpus. Ultimately, digitisation can lead to a more exploratory and iterative research approach and thus an understanding of the research corpus as an evolving, interconnected, and reflexive collection of diverse sources.
... Party leaders were the great winners of this trend, resulting in a 'centralized personalization' of politics -as opposed to 'decentralized personalization' (Balmas et al., 2014). It has translated in a rich literature looking at the importance of leaders, especially in elections and within political parties (Aarts et al., 2011;Bittner, 2011;Clarke et al., 2004;Clarke et al., 2009;Kriesi, 2012;Garzia 2012;Lobo and Curtice, 2015;Pilet and Cross, 2014;Poguntke and Webb, 2015;Wauters et al., 2018). ...
Research on the electoral personalization of politics has stressed a trend towards a greater role of top prominent political figures (party leaders and ministers). This trend was described as centralized electoral personalization. Yet, this trend is merely one side of a more complex story. No leader attracts all voters' support, and other candidates manage to stand out despite lower resources and visibility. Using a unique dataset of 47,239 actual ballot papers cast for the 2018 Belgian local elections, we show that candidates-level, lists-level and districts-level factors result in distinct preference voting behaviour. While these factors lead to unmistakable forms of (de-)centralized personalized forms of elections, we, furthermore, show that intermediary situations distinctively emerge. A significant number of 'subtop' candidates stand out among candidates, by attracting support from voters who do not support the mere leader of the list. This 'oligarchized personalization' would deserve greater attention in the literature.
... For over a decade now, various scholars have been expressing their concerns about an increasing personalization of politics (McAllister, 2007;Garzia, 2019;McAllister & Quinlan, 2019). Personalization implies that voters focus more on candidates than on parties, issues or institutions, and that politicians' personalities have a more prominent role in politics (Kriesi, 2012), with voters inferring candidates' personalities from the images they present, and using them as shortcuts for making electoral decisions (Sniderman, Brodi & Tetlock, 1991;Chen, Jing & Lee, 2012). ...
Despite the alleged increasing importance given to politicians’ personalities, the similarities and differences between citizens and politicians regarding their personality traits have been insufficiently studied. This research analyses the personality similarities and differences between citizens and politicians in Spain across party allegiances and ideologies. For this, we use two representative surveys for citizens and MPs. Our results show that Spanish politicians are a more homogeneous population—regarding their personality traits—than Spanish citizens, and that Spanish MPs are more sociable and imaginative and less lazy and artistic than the average citizen, which is consistent with a ‘politician’s personality’.
... Much scholarly energy has gone into examining how conditions in the sociopolitical arena influence people's likelihood of supporting a party. Evidence from a range of contexts tells us that societal-level factors hold the key to understanding these shifts (Kriesi, 2012;Norris and Inglehart, 2019;Spoon and Klüver, 2019). However, big-picture, aggregate patterns can only hint at individual level processes, leaving researchers unable to specify the micromechanisms-especially those in the familial context-at work. ...
Decades of evidence point to the vital role of parents in shaping their children’s partisan leanings, particularly concerning mainstream parties. And yet the contours of intergenerational influence remain quite obscured. For instance, scholars disagree on when social learning in the household occurs (childhood vs adolescence) and about who is the dominant socializer (mother vs father). Data from a long-term German household panel survey allow for a fine-grained examination of intergenerational influence processes over time. We model the partisan preferences of 18-year-olds as a function of their mothers’ and fathers’ own contemporaneous and past partisan preferences. Our intergenerational inquiry reveals that mothers dominate socialization during childhood while influence in late adolescence is more evenly distributed between mothers and fathers. We also find that mothers have an advantage over fathers in communicating center-left party preferences. These findings have implications for our understanding of socialization, partisanship, and democratic stability.
... Other comparative studies have shown that the intensity of personalization depends on the political system and the regime type. For example, the degree of political personalization in parliamentary systems seems to be somewhat lower (Holtz-Bacha et al., 2014;Kriesi, 2012). ...
With the increasing frequency of transboundary crises in the twenty-first century – examples from the past are the financial crisis, the migration crisis and the current coronavirus pandemic – the need for political leadership beyond national borders is growing. As public visibility is an essential leadership resource with regard to transboundary leadership, the question arises of how media construct and thus legitimize political leadership in transboundary crises. The basic theoretical assumption is that perceived leadership in a transboundary crisis results from publicly observable processes of attributing responsibility beyond geographical and hierarchical boundaries. Consequently, a tool for capturing attribution statements, their senders and addressees as well as their reasoning in the media coverage is presented.
Conventional wisdom is parliamentary elections have become more personalized. The idea of “leader-centeredness” pervades electoral politics, with leaders supposed to have a critical impact on election performance and popular leaders anticipated to yield significant electoral dividends, perhaps even more than party evaluations. While scholars agree leaders can and do matter to the vote, deliberations continue regarding the manifestation and extent of these effects. Using an original dataset inspired by popularity measures from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project and incorporating data from up to 87 elections in 30 polities, this article provides the first consistent aggregate quantification of demand-side behavioral personalization, disentangling the distinct and mutual influences of leader and party popularity to the extent possible. It finds that a leader’s popularity directly correlates with party vote share and the likelihood of winning office, evidence of demand-side behavioral personalization. However, the effect of leader popularity on its own is consistently less potent than that of party popularity, providing an imperative nuance to the narrative regarding demand-side behavioral personalization.
The chapter focuses on the implications for leadership and political representation arising from the processes of personalisation and disintermediation in contemporary democracies. It considers the societal changes that have led to the crisis of traditional political intermediaries, such as parties, and the rise of leader-centred democracy. The chapter examines how the personalisation of politics has reshaped the relationship between leaders and their constituencies, resulting in a more direct and plebiscitary form of democracy. It identifies the tension between individualisation and collective identity, investigating how these processes contribute to the redefinition of political leadership in modern societies. Moreover, the chapter considers the implications of these changes for the future of democratic governance, suggesting that the personalisation of leadership may undermine traditional forms of political representation.
This article seeks to examine the role of the leadership factor in the 2024 elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made leadership the centre-piece of its campaign and appeal for votes. While the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) coalition consciously avoided a confrontation with the BJP around the leadership issue, this factor continued to assume salience during the campaign. By locating the debate in the wider context of the 2014 and 2019 elections, this article, assesses whether the impact of the leadership factor, especially in the case of BJP (and the National Democratic Alliance [NDA]) has plateaued and did not add any traction to the campaign of the ruling party. A set of questions asked in the National Election Study (NES) 2024 compared with data from NES 2014 and NES 2019 form the basis of the analysis.
The exploration of the internal relationships within parties is one of the most difficult and extensive fields of party research. In particular, internal power and influence relationships are hardly penetrable and transparent. The resource equipment of parties is much better, with party financing on the one hand and the recruitment and participation of voluntary members on the other hand, being the main interest of research. How the party apparatus was modernized and professionalized for the requirements of media election campaigns has also met with broad research interest. The way in which processes of political course-determination and elite recruitment as well as candidate nomination are handled in parties is dealt with under the keyword of intra-party democracy. It raises the question of intra-party power relations. There is controversy over the extent to which the classic oligarchy theory of Robert Michels can be countered and whether it is more appropriate to assume elite competition and a broadly stratified intra-party power structure. The examination of the intra-party participation of members focuses on the extent to which the party base can participate in personnel and political decisions. This also includes program work, coupled with the question of what role programs play for parties as political tendency operations.
Tech corporations, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, have increasingly become the focus of public media attention and are subject to public scrutiny due to their prominence and scandals. Often, the news media reports on the corporations’ chief executive officers and founders as representatives of the corporations to make complex company-related information comprehensible and gain more public attention. The personalization trend in the news media has turned some corporate leaders into celebrities and is linked to tech companies’ media reputations, that is, the evaluations of tech companies in the news media. However, research on personalization in corporate news is rare and conflicting, and whether and how personalization is linked to the media reputations of Big Tech corporations is not yet clear. By focusing on different personalization types, this study investigates the relationship between personalization and the evaluation of tech companies in the news. A quantitative content analysis of media articles ( N = 5234) in Swiss news outlets revealed that the news on tech companies is frequently personalized, and personalized news is more negative and more often related to the social aspects of tech corporations than non-personalized news. Our study indicates that personalization is used as a journalistic style in the news about tech corporations but is most common in negative reporting in which the role of tech corporations in society is critically assessed.
Much of the mediatization literature argues that the increased occurrence of expressions of media logic in political news coverage is driven by supranational factors including marketization, and postulates that contextual factors such as the national democratic model can explain the marked variations between countries. However, the relationship between such structural conditions and the occurrence of media-content elements in news coverage remains underexplored. In response, we compare the incidences of seven content expressions of media logic across a classic majoritarian democracy (UK) and a classic consensual democracy (the Netherlands). Innovatively, we additionally incorporate the dynamic political constellation of the two national governments. Our logistical regression analysis of 1463 newspaper articles shows that, as expected, these content expressions of media logic occur more often under majoritarian than under consensual styles of government. Our results further reveal that the political constellation of national governments offers a more refined explanation for how coverage behaves than the less dynamic variable of adopted democratic model.
The article examines the role of the established elites in the process of the spread of populism in Europe. The author argues that populism is not so much a cause as a symptom of a crisis of democracy. The ineffectiveness and irresponsibility of the traditional political parties and the weakness of leadership by the established political elites have contributed significantly to the popularity of the populist messages. Populist political figures are taking advantage of the declining trust in political institutions, which is linked to their sub-optimal performance, especially in crisis situations.
Parliamentarians, as political personalities, are also media personalities insofar as political news is very present in the media. The objective of this article is to question the links between the political position, media presence and digital visibility of French deputies elected in 2017. Have the patterns of mediatisation changed with the digital age? What are the relations between the ‘positions’ occupied by political actors in the media as well as in the political and digital spaces in our hybrid media system? Inspired by a Bourdieusian framework, results are presented. They allow us to confirm some conclusions of the current literature and, more importantly, to rethink the process of mediatisation of members of parliament in our networked age.
This chapter examines the explanations advanced to account for prime minister empowerment and offers new depth to accounts that centre on media and communications, specifying what it is about media that empowers prime ministers. Specifically, media generates functional pressures for institutional change that consolidate the trend of centralization towards the executive centre. The book hypothesizes that these effects of media on intra-executive relations and prime minister power are translated through three causal mechanisms: authority, discretion, and resources. Each mechanism involves substantial and consequential pressures for shifts in power in favour of prime ministers. Together with functional pressures, politically the prime minister benefits from unitary communication that counteracts the exposure of political divisions. This pushes for more centralization of government communication; part of the broader trend of prime minister empowerment.KeywordsAdaptationCentralizationEmpowermentFunctionalPresidentialization
The field of election campaign communication is concerned with any form of communication by political elites, parties or professional interest groups with the aim of informing, persuading, interacting and mobilizing citizens and, ultimately, influencing the result of a particular election. Electoral campaigns are one of the most populated research domains in the field of political communication to date (de Vreese 2017; Graber 2005). With this chapter we aim to identify main trends and gaps in this popular area of study by relying on a thorough literature review of election campaign communication studies using content analysis published in peer-reviewed journals over the last twenty years. The chapter lays out most frequent research designs and analytical constructs employed by these studies to content-analyze political messages and identify styles, actors and functions of political communication in election times.
Zusammenfassung
Media are by far the voters’ most important source of information about elections and election campaigns. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the analysis of election (campaign) coverage is a long-standing tradition in communication science. Central questions in the analysis of media reporting on elections and campaigns address, for example, the amount and structure of coverage relating to topics, key actors and their evaluations.
This article explores the extent to which the observable characteristics of political leaders influence the magnitude of electoral personalisation in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Using CSES data, it analyses 18 legislative elections spanning 16 years of postcommunism, providing strong evidence that personalisation is relevant and widespread in the region and arguing that the electoral context is relevant for how leader characteristics affect personalisation. Some characteristics stimulate leader effects (age, executive experience, tenure as party chair), while others confine them (being an anti-communist dissident), have ambiguous (being a former communist leader) or no effects (gender, incumbency, time in office).
This chapter features another analysis of the I&D party grouping, but one primarily devoted to identifying and considering elements that transcended the national dimension. Common to these kinds of campaigns was the considerable attention paid by them to the immigration issue, their use of the word “people” and their marked tendency to offer negative representations of the EU. Further, the interaction between some of the leaders can be interpreted as traits of transnational trends.
Drawing on earlier work, the chapter rescues the concept of party non-systems, characterized by continuously high levels of extra-systemic volatility, such that the political universe lacks systemic political parties. The perusal of inter-temporal electoral volatility reveals that Peru adheres to this categorization. Operating in a complex political setting, Peruvian citizens evaluate politics and engage in electoral decision-making calculi utilizing the heuristic of political personal brands, which this chapter conceptualizes as a combination of ascriptive, socialization, and subjective personality traits. In addition, the concept of a “negative legitimacy environment” is here advanced, which describes a political ecosystem comprised of three elements: the prevalence of negative personal brands and negative partisanship; a priori mass public preferences for political outsiders and newcomers; and a party-unattached floating voter electorate. The last part of the chapter explains how negative legitimacy environments contribute to high political uncertainty and instability, compressed political time, and incumbent disadvantage.
This chapter examines developments in the office of Chancellor since unification. Most of the institutions relating to the Chancellorship have remained unchanged, but some of the practices surrounding these institutions have changed. German Chancellors tend to serve quite long terms and only three people have served as Chancellor since 1990, Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder, and Angela Merkel. We must therefore keep in mind that any insights about developments of the office are likely also insights about the three particular leaders who have served as Chancellor. Nonetheless, an examination of the post-unification period reveals some clear trends of continuity and change. This chapter investigates three areas in which change may have occurred, including (1) how Chancellors gain and lose office; (2) the role of the Chancellor in international affairs; (3) the presidentialization/personalization of the Chancellorship. For these three areas, this study finds solid evidence of change in the first two and a more ambiguous result regarding whether the office of Chancellor has become more presidential or more personalized. Despite the presence of only three individual Chancellors, most of the changes appear likely to continue into the future. These developments are part of the evolution of the German political system in the post-unification era, and not idiosyncratic shifts linked to the personalities of particular Chancellors.KeywordsChancellorInternational affairsElectionsInternal party democracyPresidentializationPersonalizationEuropean integration
The study is meant to provide a more actor-oriented approach to the construction of political news by looking at the competition over news exposure during political waves in Israel. Political waves are sudden and significant changes in the political environ- ment that are characterized by a substantial increase in the amount of public attention centered on a political issue or event. A theoretical model is presented that attempts to explain who initiates political waves, which types of waves provide the most opportuni- ties for the participation of different types of political actors, and which actors are in the best position to be included when different types of waves are covered in the news media. Four major hypotheses are developed that focus on both the nature of the wave and the individual characteristics of the political actors who are competing for expo- sure. Among the most important individual traits are charismatic communication skills, political standing, and the extent to which the individual can be thematically linked to the wave topic. The research employed two primary sets of data. The first set of data came from a content analysis of news articles that appeared in two major Israeli newspapers over one full year. Thirty-nine separate waves emerged from this analysis. The second set of data contains individual assessments of 91 legislators who were elected to 14th Knesset. All of the major hypotheses were confirmed.
This article proposes integrating the insights generated by framing, priming, and agenda-setting research through a systematic effort to conceptualize and understand their larger implications for political power and democracy. The organizing concept is bias, that curiously undertheorized staple of public discourse about the media. After showing how agenda setting, framing and priming fit together as tools of power, the article connects them to explicit definitions of news slant and the related but distinct phenomenon of bias. The article suggests improved measures of slant and bias. Properly defined and measured, slant and bias provide insight into how the media influence the distribution of power: who gets what, when, and how. Content analysis should be informed by explicit theory linking patterns of framing in the media text to predictable priming and agenda-setting effects on audiences. When unmoored by such underlying theory, measures and conclusions of media bias are suspect.
In this chapter we develop an agenda for future research on the personalization of politics. To do so, we clarify the propositions of the personalization hypothesis, critically discuss the normative standard on which most studies base their evaluation of personalization, and systematically summarize empirical research findings. We show that the condemnation of personalization is based on a trivial logic and on a maximalist definition of democracy. The review of empirical studies leads us to question the assumption that personalization has steadily increased in all areas of politics. Finally, our normative considerations help us develop new research questions on how personalized politics affects democracy. Moreover, this review also makes clear that another weakness of today’s empirical research on the personalization of politics lies in methodological problems and a lack of analysis of the impacts of systemic and contextual variables. Consequently, we suggest methodological pathways and possible explanatory factors for the study of personalization.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
In their introduction to this volume, Yves Mény and Yves Surel draw a distinction between ‘popular democracy’ and ‘constitutional democracy’, the two pillars on which the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic regimes rest. The popular democracy pillar is identified with an emphasis on the role of the demos that is, the free association of citizens, the maintenance of free elections, and the freedom of political expression. Popular democracy entails government by the people. The constitutional pillar, on the other hand, is identified with an emphasis on the institutional requirements for good governance—the establishment of rules and constraints limiting executive autonomy, the guaranteeing of individual and collective rights, and the maintenance of a system of checks and balances intended to prevent the abuse of power. The constitutional pillar may be associated with the defence of the public good, entailing government for the people. For Mény and Surel, an ideal democracy should aim to establish an equilibrium between both pillars.
The study of populism is, like the phenomenon itself, limited in scope and duration, and somewhat episodic. It seems that populism acquires a certain intellectual currency at irregular intervals but lacks staying power. In consequence, populism is one of the most widely used but poorly understood political concepts of our time. This is a deficiency because, as I shall argue, it provides us with a useful tool for understanding the pathology of representative politics. Populism is not a universal concept that, once unlocked, will enable us to decipher all other political debates, but it is a useful secondary concept that, if used sensitively and systematically, will enable us to understand populist movements, and which will, perhaps more importantly, allow us to understand essential elements in the politics of representation.
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
Historically, both Belgium and the Netherlands are archetypes of ‘consociational democracies’. These are characterized by broad multi-party coalitions, numerous power-sharing devices, and fragile checks and balances in order to ensure due influence for all relevant parties and minority groups. Hence, the overarching logic of these consensus democracies seems to represent an obstacle to a process of presidentialization.
However, we argue that the need for strong leadership resulted in more prominent and powerful positions for the (parliamentary) party leaders and Prime Ministers. We present evidence of a process of presidentialization that gained momentum a decade earlier in the Netherlands (from the 1970s onwards) than it did in Belgium (from the 1980s).
It is interesting to note that the increased autonomy of Prime Ministers is not due to constitutional amendments, but tends to be linked to the increased decision-making role for the inner cabinet, the professionalization of the Prime Minister’s Office, and the growing attention the audiovisual media give to the Prime Minister.
Similarly, parliamentary party leaders in The Netherlands and extra-parliamentary party leaders in Belgium grew stronger through an accumulation of power and resources at the leader’s office, personalized campaigning and a centralization of control over inner party selection procedures, and party leadership selection.
Media election campaign coverage is said to have changed fundamentally in recent decades. Among the trends identified are personalization, negativism, more interpretive coverage, deauthentication, and horse-race coverage. Usually, U.S. studies are cited as empirical evidence for these developments. Recent studies of European campaigns have shown, however, that the picture seems to be different there in various respects.This article argues that one of the reasons for the differences might be the lack of some central campaign events in European elections. Taking Germany as an example, it investigates how the introduction of American-style televised debates in 2002 and 2005 changed media coverage of the major candidates. On the basis of a long-term content analysis between 1949 and 2005, several dramatic effects of this new campaign event are shown.
The growing intrusion of media into the political domain in many countries has led critics to worry about the approach of the "media-driven republic," in which mass media will usurp the functions of political institutions in the liberal state. However, close inspection of the evidence reveals that political institutions in many nations have retained their functions in the face of expanded media power. The best description of the current situation is "mediatization," where political institutions increasingly are dependent on and shaped by mass media but nevertheless remain in control of political processes and functions.
This book proposes a new kind of democracy for the modern era, one that not only gives citizens more power but also allows them more opportunities to exercise this power thoughtfully. James S. Fishkin here suggests an innovative solution to the problem of inadequate deliberation, in particular within our presidential nomination system. His reform involves a well-publicized national caucus in which a representative sample of American citizens would interact directly with presidential contenders in order to reflect and vote on the issues and candidates. In adapting democracy to the large scale nation state, says Fishkin, Americans have previously had two choices. They could participate directly through primaries and referenda or they could depend on elite groups-such as party conventions and legislatures-to represent them. The first choice offers political equality but little chance for deliberation; the second offers the participants an opportunity to deliberate but provides less political equality for the electorate. The national caucus that Fishkin proposes-an example of what he calls a "deliberative opinion poll"-combines deliberation with political equality and reveals what the public would think if it had better conditions and information with which to explore and define the issues with the candidates. Arguing persuasively for the usefulness of deliberative opinion polls, Fishkin places them within the history of democratic theory and practice, exploring models of democracy ranging form ancient Athens and the debates of the American founders to contemporary transitions toward democracy in Eastern Europe.
This important new text brings together an outstanding group of international scholars to look at the current state of electoral politics around the world. Elements of the modern (or American) model of election campaigning have been adopted in many countries in recent years—including the use of mass media, the personalization of campaigns, use of public opinion polls, and a general professionalization of campaigns—and conditions would seem to favor the spread of that model. Contributors to this volume, from established democracies, new and restored democracies, and democracies facing destabilizing pressure, examine the extent to which electoral politics in their countries have been affected by the emergence of high-tech professional campaigns. Countries examined provide a cross-section of today's democracies, including the United States, Britain, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Poland, Spain, Israel, Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. The work will be of interest to scholars and students alike in political communication, political parties and elections, and comparative politics.
This article looks at the personalization of politics, starting with a careful examination of the evidence that leaders are becoming more important. The role of electronic media in personalizing politics and politicians is examined, along with institutions and political leadership. The concept 'political priming' is introduced, which is the process where leaders are evaluated by voters based on the leader's performance on issues considered important to the voters. The consequences of the personalization of politics and the decline of electoral participation and parties are discussed in the last portion of the article.
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
Over the past three decades the effects of globalization and denationalization have created a division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Western Europe. This study examines the transformation of party political systems in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK) using opinion surveys, as well as newly collected data on election campaigns. The authors argue that, as a result of structural transformations and the strategic repositioning of political parties, Europe has observed the emergence of a tripolar configuration of political power, comprising the left, the moderate right, and the new populist right. They suggest that, through an emphasis on cultural issues such as mass immigration and resistance to European integration, the traditional focus of political debate - the economy - has been downplayed or reinterpreted in terms of this new political cleavage. This new analysis of Western European politics will interest all students of European politics and political sociology.
The changing circumstances in which parties compete in contemporary democracies, coupled with the changing circumstances in which governments now govern, have led to a widening of the traditional gap between representative and responsible government. Although it is generally seen as desirable that parties in government are both representative and responsible, these two characteristics are now becoming increasingly incompatible. Prudence and consistency in government, as well as accountability, require conformity to external constraints and legacies. This means more than just answering to public opinion. While these external constraints and legacies have become weightier in recent years, public opinion, in its turn, has become harder and harder for governments to read. Hence we see the growing incompatibility. Meanwhile, because of changes in their organizations and in their relationship with civil society, parties are no longer in a position to bridge or 'manage' this gap, or even to persuade voters to accept it as a necessary element in political life. This growing incompatibility is one of the principal sources of the democratic malaise that confronts many Western democracies today. Die sich wandelnden Rahmenbedingungen für Regierungen und für den Parteienwettbewerb in modernen Demokratien haben zu einer Verbreiterung der traditionellen Kluft zwischen repräsentativem und responsivem Regieren geführt. Obgleich von regierenden Parteien erwartet wird, dass sie sowohl repräsentativ als auch responsiv handeln, lassen sich diese beiden Vorgehensweisen immer schwerer miteinander vereinbaren. Eine umsichtig und nachhaltig handelnde Regierung, die ihrer Rechenschaftspflicht gegenüber dem Bürger nachkommt, darf sich nicht nur an der öffentlichen Meinung orientieren, sondern muss externe Sachzwänge ebenso berücksichtigen wie die Vermächtnisse vorhergehender Regierungen - zwei Faktoren, die in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen haben. Hinzu kommt, dass die öffentliche Meinung für Regierungen immer schwieriger zu deuten ist. Aufgrund von strukturellen Veränderungen sowie Veränderungen in ihrem Verhältnis zu den Bürgern sind die Parteien inzwischen nicht mehr in der Lage, die entstandene Kluft zu überbrücken beziehungsweise zu handhaben oder gar ihre Wähler davon zu überzeugen, sie als unverzichtbaren Bestandteil des politischen Lebens zu akzeptieren. Die zunehmende Unvereinbarkeit repräsentativen und responsiven Regierens ist eine der Haupt¬ursachen für die 'Politikverdrossenheit', mit der sich viele westliche Demokratien heute konfrontiert sehen.
To succeed in foreign policy, U.S. presidents have to sell their versions or framings of political events to the news media and to the public. But since the end of the Cold War, journalists have increasingly resisted presidential views, even offering their own spin on events. What, then, determines whether the media will accept or reject the White House perspective? And what consequences does this new media environment have for policymaking and public opinion? To answer these questions, Robert M. Entman develops a powerful new model of how media framing worksâa model that allows him to explain why the media cheered American victories over small-time dictators in Grenada and Panama but barely noticed the success of far more difficult missions in Haiti and Kosovo. Discussing the practical implications of his model, Entman also suggests ways to more effectively encourage the exchange of ideas between the government and the media and between the media and the public. His book will be an essential guide for political scientists, students of the media, and anyone interested in the increasingly influential role of the media in foreign policy.
Daniele Caramani describes the transformation of politics from an environment where voting behavior differs greatly between regions to one where it is homogeneous within nations. Looking at long-term evolution, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Caramani utilizes data on specific constituencies rather than on a national level. He demonstrates that a nation-wide homogeneous dimension emerged from national and industrial revolutions and replaced preindustrial territorial dimensions. His analysis is constructed along the lines of party families and reveals why countries currently exhibit different levels of homogeneity.
use the ratio of the share of candidates over the share of party mentions as indicator
- Alternatively
- Dalton
Alternatively, Dalton et al. (2000) use the ratio of the share of candidates over the share of party mentions as indicator.
that there is no trend toward an increasing dominance of the government par-ties in election campaigns of the six countries. If anything, the government parties' share of attention has been decreasing since the 1970s in all the countries except Britain, where it remained rather stable
- Note
Note, by the way, that there is no trend toward an increasing dominance of the government par-ties in election campaigns of the six countries. If anything, the government parties' share of attention has been decreasing since the 1970s in all the countries except Britain, where it remained rather stable (not shown here).
Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics The Personalization of Politics. A Study of Parliamentary Democracies
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West European Politics in the Age of GlobalizationTechnical Appendix
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The Personalization of Politics The Oxford Handbook of Political Behaviour
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Patterns of Modern Electoral Campaigning and Their Consequences
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