Abstract
It has become common to think about information referring to political leaders’ personalities and personal lives as pervading public discourse. This intrusion of the personal into the public sphere has raised some serious questions about the ways in which it affects the quality of democracy or at least democratic discourse. These normative concerns are generally in relation to the quality of political information, influence on the rationality of voters’ decisions and relationships between voters and politicians.
Out of frustration that public discourse is perceived, but not proved, to be personalised, as well as arguments about the negative effects of personalisation constructed without proper empirical evidence, in this book Ana Inés Langer takes a more positive stance towards the effects of the personalisation of politics. Through informed discussion of the subject she makes a strong case for the point that personalised discourse can engage citizens and politically motivate them. However, she wisely remains careful with her conclusions, aware of the fact that, for instance, emphasis on the personal can exclude from politics those actors unable to perform in this personalised discourse, but otherwise perfectly capable of performing political duties (which can be seen as a downside of this phenomenon). Langer goes beyond ‘sweeping statements [and] grand generalisations’ (p. 1) and tries first to clarify theoretically the personalisation of politics phenomenon and second, to contribute to the empirical evidence on the issue. With its clear focus and structure, as well as its logically developing arguments, Langer’s book will appeal not only to those interested in the topics of personalisation and political communication, but also more broadly to those concerned with the practices of (modern) democracy.
In the first two chapters Langer unpacks the conceptual muddle regarding the personalisation phenomenon, while in the rest of the book she applies her conceptual framework to inform her longitudinal quantitative content analysis and historical qualitative analysis. Langer looks at the personalisation of politics as a multidimensional concept, making distinctions between presidentialisation, which she defines as a ‘process by which individual political figures become more central in the decision-making process, displacing other political actors’, and personality politics, which refers to ‘an increasing emphasis in political discourse on the character and personal lives of politicians’ (p. 6). Personality politics is further broken into two distinctive types: one which emphasizes a politician’s ‘leadership or political qualities’ (p. 8), and another that accentuates their personal/private life and qualities (defined here as the politicisation of private persona). Langer reasonably argues that these distinctions between the different dimensions of personalisation are important for performing empirical analysis and for pinpointing their effects on democratic processes. Only a nuanced approach like this can reveal if the public discourse is (or is not) invaded by information usually regarded as politically relevant (such as leaders’ integrity) or politically irrelevant (such as leaders’ appearance). Langer uses her terms and their meanings consistently throughout the book and informs her data collection and interpretation accordingly, which is important given that the term personalisation has a wide range of uses in academic literature.
The quantitative part of Langer’s research is conducted through a content analysis of the British daily newspapers The Times and The Guardian over a time span of 64 years from the end of the Second World War. Langer looks at all three dimensions of personalisation in this analysis: (1) presidentialisation, (2) the emphasis on leadership traits and (3) the politicisation of the private persona. First, in regard to the presidentialisation thesis, while results show that the leaders’ media visibility did increase over time, the trend was not linear. Langer tries to explain the reasons for these fluctuations by examining the historical context in which they took place. She argues that the detected variations indicate that structural changes, which she identifies as the rise of an autonomous media, the weakening of cleavages, parties and party identification, and the increase in the number of floating voters, act as ‘important drivers of personalisation’, but that the degree of presidentialisation is also ‘influenced by [the leader’s] style, political strength and popularity, and the nature of the significant events that dominate their premierships’ (p. 88). It is left unclear as to which of these ‘drivers’ influenced the presidentialisation the most. The only trend that showed clear growth is related to ‘references to the government as “belonging” to the prime minister rather than the party’ (p. 78). Langer logically concludes here that leaders were ‘attributed more power’ (p. 88) and responsibility by the media, which does not necessarily imply an actual shift in the distribution of power, driven by a constitutional change, between leaders and parties or governments.
One of the most important methodological tasks in differentiating between the two dimensions of personality politics was to draw clear boundaries between political/leadership personality traits and personal/private ones. The author admits that the boundaries between political and private traits are blurred and that it is often difficult to claim that one trait is more political than the other, especially since what was once considered private is not necessarily perceived to be so now. Langer circumvents the problem of boundaries by adopting the set of traits used previously in similar research, but adapts them to fit the continuum between political and private to avoid broad generalizations. For example, competence is seen as a political trait, and family-orientation as a personal one, while in the middle stand traits such as appealing and inspiring. If the researched text contained references to both political and personal traits, ‘the article was coded in the latter category’ (p. 82), which might ultimately have interfered with the ratio of articles which included political and personal traits. Furthermore, five variables were identified to indicate reporting about leaders’ personal lives: family life, appearance, lifestyle, upbringing and religion. Some justification as to why these variables were chosen, while for example, variables such as ‘love life’ were not, would be helpful in determining the author’s reasoning on this point.
This part of the research showed that there was no significant increase in the references to leaders’ political leadership qualities. However, the number of references to leaders’ personal lives and traits showed systematic growth since the 1980s, and Langer comes to the sound conclusion that ‘the evidence reveals important qualitative changes in what is regarded as relevant traits’ (p. 82), primarily in the view of politicians and journalists. In addition, since personal references were rarely the main focus of the articles and they mainly appeared in the non-politically oriented articles, the author argues that the personal has come to supplement rather than replace the political.
In the next three chapters Langer employs qualitative historical analysis in an attempt to define changes and continuities in the historical development of the politicisation of public persona in the UK. She does so by looking into the strategic use of ‘the personal for the construction of a public persona’ (p. 91), providing the reader with an interesting and insightful narrative that reveals some well- and some less well-known details about the communication strategies of British prime ministers starting from 1923. In ‘the chicken or the egg’ question, or rather in this case the question of whether the politicisation of public persona was originally driven by the media or by political actors, Langer seems to choose political actors. However, her reluctance to form a definite decision is visible from numerous references in her work to the importance of the changes in the ways in which politics is mediated. It is, for example, emphasized that television significantly changed ‘the social conditions of privacy’ (p. 97), as well as encouraged political parties and their leaders to personalise their communication to a greater extent.
The emphasis in the research is on Tony Blair, whose leadership Langer describes as ‘remarkable’ (p. 112). According to the author, Blair did not use the personal simply as an image-making technique, but rather as a branding strategy: ‘he anchored the political in the personal and the leader in the human being, both personalising the political and politicising the personal’ (p. 136). Since research of media reporting about Blair’s successor Gordon Brown and the Conservative leader David Cameron showed that the degree of the personal in public discourse did not, after Blair, return to pre-Blair values, Langer concludes that Blair’s leadership style led to the use of the personal in public discourse becoming routine, legitimized the media’s interest in the personal and altered expectations of what a leader should be like.
Langer’s book sheds new light onto the conceptual muddle related to the personalisation of politics, provides much needed historical and empirical evidence on how the phenomenon developed in the UK and identifies its main characteristics. Although the possible influence of some contextual factors was indicated, their importance is left undefined and this unpacking of causal links between media and political influences and different dimensions of personalisation is obviously the next important step in personalisation research. In sum, Langer’s definition of the politicisation of public persona is a very useful concept, because it helps pinpoint the exact manifestation of the personal in public discourse, and the empirical evidence provided in the book is a great starting point for anybody interested in this phenomenon.