Abstract
The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal is possibly the most famous example of a politician’s infidelity. However, it is certainly not the only one. The list of politicians who have been caught by the media transgressing the norms of sexual and family behavior is a long one, and includes John McCain, David Mellor, Silvio Berlusconi, Jim Cairns, Hans-Juergen Uhl and Nicolas Sarkozy.
James Stanyer’s Intimate Politics: Publicity, Privacy and the Personal Lives of Politicians in Media-saturated Democracies explores this topic of the media’s exposure of politicians’ personal lives cross-nationally and cross-temporally, asking two questions. First, to what extent are politicians’ personal lives visible in media reporting? And, second, how can the differences between countries, but also between leaders within the same country, be explained? He draws on a variety of media sources, including newspaper coverage, appearances on entertainment shows and leaders’ biographies in order to answer the first question in the context of seven democracies: the US, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. In order to answer the second question, Stanyer innovatively uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). What results is a comprehensive and empirically substantiated overview of the ways in which, and the extent to which, the information about a politician’s personal sphere becomes public. This is a book that should appeal to those interested in political communication, political science and media studies, but also to those who are more generally concerned with the ways in which politics is mediated in advanced industrial democracies.
Stanyer defines the mediating of politicians’ privacy as ‘intimization’, a ‘revelatory process which involves the publicizing of information and imagery from what we might ordinarily understand as a politicians’ personal life’ (p. 14). Conceptually he distinguishes between scandalous and non-scandalous coverage, and between consensual and non-consensual exposure. The rest of the book focuses, first, on consensual non-scandalous coverage of politicians’ personal lives in which what is reported ‘can largely be considered benign, although [it] may sometimes be critical or laudatory’ (p. 17), and is done ‘with the expressed or implied consent of those they feature’ (p. 16). Second, he identifies the non-consensual scandalous coverage which has the ‘potential to damage a politician’s reputation, career or personal relations’ and is entering the public sphere ‘without expressed or implied consent’ (pp. 16–17) of the politician in question.
The first study presented in the book focuses on consensual non-scandalous coverage in the period from 1995 to 2009. Stanyer analyses national newspapers, excluding tabloids, in order to determine the visibility of leaders’ spouses and children, their holidays and birthdays, also taking into account their appearances on entertainment talk shows and the books that are published on their personal lives. The results show that there ‘is both a variation between countries and between leaders within countries’ (p. 56) in the levels of publicity given to a politician’s personal life. The most striking difference is between the US and the UK on one side, where leaders’ personal lives are highly publicly visible, and Australia, Italy and Germany on the other side, where there is hardly any mediated information about leaders’ personal lives.
This is revealing and important. However, as sometimes happens in comparative studies, depth of research has been sacrificed for breadth. For example, the method for establishing the visibility of leaders’ spouses, children, holidays and birthdays used a name search in the Nexis database. Therefore, it is only assumed, and not established, that the articles captured by the search included consensual non-scandalous coverage. Stanyer (2007) himself has argued elsewhere that the coverage of, for example, a politician’s family includes exposures of such things as Hillary Clinton’s role in the Whitewater affair, Cherie Blair’s business deals with convicted felon Peter Foster, and Jenna Bush’s drunk behavior. Such coverage of family members is neither consensual nor non-scandalous in nature. But even if the data reported by Stanyer does not necessarily refer to consensual non-scandalous exposure, it certainly does reveal the extent to which a politician’s personal sphere is visible in the media.
Alongside the variety in the levels of publicized personal information, Stanyer also reveals that there are significant differences between leaders within the same country. His analysis shows that in all but one country (Germany) ‘there has been an increase in the attention paid to the personal lives of national leaders’ although ‘not at the same rate or to the same extent in each democracy’ (p. 60). Given that the increase in the levels of visibility is mostly non-linear, Stanyer employed fsQCA to identify the sets of factors which explain observed ‘personal differences’ (p. 57). He found that there is no single explanation for discovered variations, but that there are several paths to high levels of exposure. A necessary condition is, first, that the leader is part of the baby boom generation; second, that he/she needs to personally bond with voters and, third, that the level of party membership is low. However, this combination of factors needs to be supplemented with strong tabloid presence and a presidential political system, or rather, one of these conditions can be omitted if the leader sits at the ideological centre.
Stanyer goes on to examine and explain the levels of non-consensual scandalous coverage of politicians’ personal lives. He puts the focus on the publicized cases of politicians’ infidelity, from 1970 to 2009, drawing on a range of sources – newspapers, magazines, news websites and academic texts on political scandals. The most important finding from this analysis is that the exposure of non-consensual scandalous information is mainly a US phenomenon, although present in the UK, but almost non-existent in other observed countries. In order to explain these cross-national differences Stanyer again uses fsQCA and comes to the conclusion that the media is more willing to expose politicians’ sex scandals in countries characterized by a strong tabloid media sector, a weak privacy culture (evident in weak privacy laws and weak ethical consensus among journalists about what constitutes public interest) and either a large presence of the Christian right in politics or a strongly partisan press.
Interestingly, Stanyer’s final analysis shows that although the daily newspapers in Germany, Spain, Italy and France were reluctant to expose sex scandals of their own politicians, they were willing to report sex scandals from the US and the UK, suggesting that these media outlets do consider this kind of information newsworthy. Stanyer discusses these findings in the context of the decreasing potential of politicians to control the mediation of their personal lives. However he overlooks the implications of this development for the readiness of media, in Germany and France for example, to expose their own politicians’ transgression.
In summary, this book advances the research on mediated politics in several ways. First, through the concepts of (non)consensual and (non)scandalous exposure it offers a more nuanced understanding of mediated political communication. Second, it offers much needed comparative data across countries and time. Third, it addresses the under-explored question of transnational news flows and, finally, it innovatively uses fsQCA to explain the trends in political communication that will certainly inspire other similar studies. Hopefully this book will spur others to move the scope of comparative studies beyond western democracies towards other less explored contexts.