Friday, March 14, 2014
Council (Omni Shoreham)
The mainstream explanation of the personalization of politics, including the personalization of election campaigns, follows a modernist approach. The steadily commercializing media environment, which rewards human interest news with disproportionate attention, offers incentives for political actors to deliver their messages in a personalized context. Rational voters, who want to keep information costs low, readily accept this personalized commodity packages of information and by their demand also contribute to a personalization of election campaigns. Increasingly professionalized political actors strategically anticipate this and choose personalization strategies to get attention, transport their message, and ultimately get elected. Therefore, differences in electoral personalization strategies are commonly explained by macro-level, time-variant factors. But evidence for this classical modernist personalization hypothesis is at best mixed, let alone can it explain intra-country variance at the same point in time. In the paper, I will develop a model of institutional, partisan, and individual explanatory factors, which have to at least supplement the modernist approach in explaining the choice of a personalized campaign strategy by political actors. The model will be tested on a new comparative dataset including national and regional (and European) elections in five western countries.
