Individual politicians and their messages increasingly matter for our interest and trust in politics. Think only of the political figures in your country and how they influence your opinion. But little is known how the personalization of politics works out in European Union politics. Do we find personalization of politics at the EU level and does this influence our opinion of the EU? With a wealth of empirical evidence communication researcher Katjana Gattermann concludes that personalization of EU politics is conditional upon institutional media and temporal contexts and so far has limited consequences for European citizens' awareness, trust and interest in EU politics.
The relationship between media and politics is of reciprocal nature in democratic societies. Media hold political actors publicly accountable, while politicians often seek media attention to inform their voters about their own achievements. When politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes and key drivers of voters' choice, we call this the personalization of politics. It is well established in national-level politics, but less is known about this phenomenon in European Union politics.
Recent political developments suggest that such a trend is also underway on EU level, for example the introduction of the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure for the 2014 European Parliament election. For the first time major European party families were encouraged to put forward top candidates to increase the interest in and awareness of the elections among European citizens. Could personalization make EU politics more accessible to its citizens?
Personalization with respect to institutions, media, politics, and citizens
In her new book communication scientist Katjana Gattermann examines personalization with respect to institutions, media, politics, and citizens in the European Union. 'Institutions are important because the formal personalization of rules and procedures enables media and ultimately citizens to hold responsible decisionmakers to account', she explains. Gattermann also calls it pertinent to understand the extent to which the media personalize their news from Brussels and Strasbourg. 'News media are a crucial link between EU citizens and their representatives.'
But politicians must also make themselves visible in the political debate. Gattermann argues that 'if personalization does not occur in the behaviour of politicians, the media will likely have a hard time to inform citizens about the achievements of their representatives. And if media do not pick up on more personalized behaviour they fail to provide a link between representatives and those they represent.'
Research methods For her analysis Gattermann relied on an innovative longitudinal and cross-country comparative research design and applied multiple methods including experiments, analyses of news stories, and survey data. The data comprise newspaper articles that have been published in the last 20-30 years in several European countries, including Ireland, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, and Italy; parliamentary questions collected from the European Parliament website between 1999 and 2019; Twitter data; Eurobarometer data; and own survey data collected for the experimental analyses in Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany in recent years. The data have been analysed using statistical methods.
