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.

Keywords

media systems national election campaigns personalization presidentialization Western European party systems

Introduction

A growing literature points to the increasing ‘personalization of politics'. On the one hand, this trend is attributed to the process of dealignment in the party system, which weakens the traditional attachments of citizens to political parties (Dalton et al., 2000: 37–54). On the other hand, it is said to be reinforced by the media which have developed their own ‘media logic’ for covering politics in general, and political campaigns in particular (Swanson and Mancini, 1996: 251). Personalization, just as negativity, conflict and drama, is one of the news values pursued by the mass media in their competition for a mass audience. With the weakening of traditional party loyalties, and the increasing role of the media in politics, the role of individual politicians and of politicians as individuals is said to have increased in all political systems. The alleged personalization refers to two related phenomena: a stronger focus on candidates/politicians instead of parties, institutions, or issues; and a change in the criteria for the evaluation of politicians, from features regarding their professional competence and performance to features concerning non-political personality traits.

These phenomena have been studied mainly in three areas: media coverage, election campaigns and voting behaviour. The present study deals with the media coverage of election campaigns, which is the area where the empirical evidence for personalization has been most unequivocal so far (Adam and Maier, 2010). This study asks whether there is a trend towards a stronger focus on candidates/politicians in the media during election campaigns in six Western European countries. It introduces the distinction between focusing on candidates/politicians in general, and concentrating the attention on the top candidates in particular. This distinction is quite important in the context of current debates about ‘deparliamentarization’ (Mény and Surel, 2000: 111) – the progressive erosion of the ties which linked the party and its leader in European democracies – or ‘presidentialization’ (Poguntke and Webb, 2005), the increasingly dominant role of prime ministers in parliamentary systems. Because of data limitations, the criteria for the evaluation of politicians will not be studied here.

Given the importance of the ‘personalization thesis', the empirical evidence in its support is surprisingly thin. McAllister (2007: 584), who suggests that there is ‘little doubt that politics has become more personalized over the past half-century’, provides little systematic evidence to support his claim. In fact, two recent assessments of the empirical evidence come up with rather mixed conclusions. Thus the review of the empirical state of the art by Adam and Maier (2010: 35) challenges the widespread view that ‘personalization of politics is an overarching phenomenon which increases sharply in all Western societies'. Only as far as media coverage is concerned do they find ‘relatively clear evidence for a development from parties and issues to persons'. The most systematic finding comes from a comparative study of Dalton et al. (2000) which shows that the ratio of candidate to party mentions in media coverage during elections has increased in four out of five countries – the Unites States (US), the UK, Austria, and France – between 1952 and 1997. The exception in their study is Canada. As far as election campaigns in general are concerned, however, Adam and Maier (2010) cannot observe any systematic changes toward personalization. It is the specific institutional design of the US – that is, a presidential system combined with primaries – which gives candidates a very prominent role. Otherwise, from time to time, campaigns seem to be personalized in all countries. Moreover, the authors conclude that personalization has not yet strongly affected voting decisions, and personalization has not yet transformed the political process into a depoliticized contest in which non-political traits, such as physical appearance, have become increasingly important.

Similarly, Karvonen’s (2010) assessment of the literature at the outset of his new study points in the same direction. He then goes on to assemble his own empirical evidence on the importance of individual political actors in parliamentary democracies – the importance of individuals at the top level, the importance of individual candidates, the importance of party leader evaluations for the voters' choice, and the importance of party leaders in media coverage. He comes to the conclusion that there is no clear and pervasive trend towards personalization. Confirming the assessment by Adam and Maier (2010), the findings on media coverage are most supportive of the personalization thesis. The evidence for the other aspects of personalization are less straight-forward, and vary from one country to the other. Karvonen (2010: 102–5) ends up by distinguishing positive (Belgium, Finland, Ireland), mixed-positive (Denmark, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK), mixed-negative (Austria, Germany, Malta) and negative cases (Canada, Japan, Norway).

In this article, I first discuss a list of factors that may have an influence on the degree to which the thesis may apply in a given national context. Next, I present a data-set that can be used for the study of the personalization thesis. This data covers national election campaigns in the mass media in six Western European countries – Austria (A), France (F), Germany (G), the Netherlands (NL), Switzerland (S) and the UK – three of which (A, F, UK) have been covered by Dalton et al. (2000), and four of which (A, D, NL, UK) by Karvonen (2010). Finally, I present some results from the analysis of this dataset.

Factors determining the degree of personalization

The process of dealignment in the party system and the process of commercialization in the media system – the two processes most clearly associated with the phenomenon of ‘personalization of politics' – are general trends that are expected to lead to similar changes in media coverage all over Western Europe. Thus, everywhere personalization is one of the two powerful new techniques created by commercial media (the other one is the tendency to privilege the point of view of the ‘ordinary citizen’; Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 277f.). While commercialization has developed most in the liberal media systems (Canada, Ireland, US and, to a lesser, degree the UK), it has come to characterize other media systems, too. In other words, these factors lead me to expect similar longitudinal trends of personalization in all the countries compared. However, the degree of personalization at a given point in time may well vary from one country to the other, most importantly as a function of the type of political system (Adam and Maier, 2010).

Institutional aspects of the political system and general political trends

As has often been argued, presidential systems focus the attention on the presidents, and on the candidates for the presidency, which implies both a greater amount of personalization of politics in general, and a greater concentration of the attention on top leaders than in parliamentary systems. The particular case of the US illustrates the impact of a presidential system on personalization. France is the only country among the six that will be studied here with a (semi-)presidential system. Accordingly, I expect the greatest amount of personalization for the election campaigns in the French presidential elections. Presidential elections tend not only to personalize the contest, but also to concentrate the attention on the presidential candidates of the major parties that have a chance of winning the contest. In the first round of the presidential elections in France, which we shall look at here, the number of candidates is still relatively large, so I do not expect the focus of media attention to be limited to the top two candidates only. But I still expect it to be much more concentrated than in parliamentary systems.

Four countries, which I deal with in the empirical part of this paper – Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK – are parliamentary democracies. While parliamentary systems are generally expected to be characterized by a lesser degree of general personalization than (semi-) presidential systems, the ‘presidentialization’ thesis predicts that, even in parliamentary systems, there is an increasing focus on the top political leaders. Moreover, in the UK, the concentration of power in the hands of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet is likely to enhance both general personalization and the focus on the top leaders. Similarly, the privileged position of the Chancellor in the ‘Chancellor-democracies' of Austria and Germany is likely to enhance both types of personalization (Sartori, 1997: 106f), compared to the Netherlands, where the Prime Minister does not enjoy a similarly privileged position. Switzerland’s directorial system closely resembles the Dutch parliamentary system from the point of view of the personalization of politics in general. With respect to the concentration of media attention on chief executives, it can be expected to be even less pronounced in Switzerland, given its collegial government and its rotating presidency. Compared to Switzerland, concentration of attention on national leaders is also expected to be greater in the Netherlands, because the entire country constitutes a single electoral district. Given its institutional setting, Switzerland is likely to be characterized by the lowest level of concentration of media attention on national political leaders.

Media types, style of campaign communication, and the specific context of an election

Given the overall trend towards convergence of media systems, it is probably more adequate to distinguish between types of media outlets within media systems, as the differences in the degree of personalization probably vary a great deal within a given country, depending on the degree of commercialization of the media outlet. Thus, in his summary of a study of party leaders in newspaper election coverage in Sweden, Karvonen (2010: 94) reports that the tabloid press is characterized by a stronger focus on party leaders than the quality press. The same study found no change in the amount of attention attributed to party leaders by the quality press.

As far as the campaign communication style is concerned, Adam and Maier (2010: 40) suggest that televised debates between leading candidates promote personalization. In their study of German election campaigns, Reinemann and Wilke (2007) hardly found any long-term personalization trends between 1949 and 1998. The introduction of televised debates between top candidates in 2002 and 2005, however, led to a significant increase of attention for the candidates, and these debates also drastically changed the relevance of the dimensions by which the candidates were judged. Accordingly, I would expect to find an enhancement of the personalization in the German electoral campaigns of the 2000s.

The personalization of election campaigns in media coverage may also vary due to the specific context of an election; that is, the election-specific configuration of parties, candidates and issues. From time to time, election campaigns have been personalized in all countries; for example, the campaigns of Adenauer in Germany, or the ones of Eisenhower in the United States (Adam and Maier, 2010: 22). Some party leaders have particular charisma. Their ‘charismatic communication skills', that is, their ‘demonstrated skills, performance, and talent in the political communication arena’ (Wolfsfeld and Sheafer, 2006: 338; Entman, 2004, 2007) may induce party strategists to opt for a personalization of the campaign, and journalists to pay particular attention to these leaders. The populist leaders, who have mobilized in some of the six countries under study, are special cases of this more general phenomenon. However, if charisma is, indeed, of increasing importance in contemporary politics, I would expect a generally-increasing trend of personalization, independently of the specific circumstance of particular election campaigns. Since I am interested in the overall long-term trends here, I shall not study individual elections, except for the analysis of the attention paid to particularly conspicuous top personalities.

The data

The data come from a study of the transformation of national party systems in six Western European countries. This study included all elections of the 1990s and of the years 2000 up to 2007, plus one election from the 1970s, which constitutes the baseline for the developments of these systems later on (see Kriesi et al., 2006, 2008). Table 1 presents an overview of the elections covered by this study. The study was mainly based on the analysis of election campaigns in the press. For each country, a quality paper and a tabloid were selected. The authors always selected the most widespread paper in each category among the newspapers that were published throughout the whole period covered by the study. Table 2 presents an overview of the selected newspapers. For each electoral campaign, all articles, except commentaries, related to the electoral contest or to domestic politics in general were selected in both newspapers for the last two months before election day. With regard to the quality newspapers, a sampling method was used within the two-month period.¹ Because the tabloids have fewer articles, all issues within the two-month period were selected.

Table 1.

Elections covered

Country	Newspapers			TV-news
Country	1970s	1990s	2000s	TV-news
Austria	1975	1994, 1999	2002, 2006	2002
Britain	1974 (Feb.)	1992, 1997	2001, 2005	—
France¹	—	1988, 1995	2002, 2007	2002
Germany	1976	1994, 1998	2002, 2005	2002
Netherlands	1972	1994, 1998	2002, 2003, 2006	2002
Switzerland	1975	1991, 1995, 1999	2003, 2007	1999

Note. No data available for TV-news in Britain.

¹For France, the election covered in the 1970s was a parliamentary election, which means that it is not comparable to the presidential elections covered in the 1990s and 2000s.

Table 2.

Selected newspapers

	Quality press	Tabloid
Austria	Die Presse	Kronenzeitung
Britain	The Times	The Sun
France	Le Monde	Le Parisien
Germany	Süddeutsche Zeitung	Bild
Netherlands	NRC Handelsblad	Algemeen Dagblad ¹
Switzerland	Neue Zürcher Zeitung	Blick

¹ In the Netherlands, no widespread genuine tabloid exists. Therefore, we chose a newspaper with a large circulation and a style close to a tabloid.

For the articles selected, the headlines, the ‘lead’, if available, and the first paragraph were coded sentence by sentence using the relational method of content analysis developed by Kleinnijenhuis and colleagues (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 1997; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001). This method is designed to code every relationship between ‘political objects' (i.e. either between two political actors – an ‘actor–actor’ sentence – or between a political actor and a political issue – an ‘actor–issue’ sentence) appearing in the text. All relationships were coded, which involved a political party or a party representative (an individual candidate, a minister, or a party secretary) as subject actor.

For the purposes of the present study, I am interested in the subject actors of both ‘actor–actor’ and ‘actor–issue’ sentences. According to this coding procedure, each sentence of an article is reduced to its most basic structure, the so-called ‘core sentence’, indicating only its subject (political actor) and its object (another political actor or an issue) as well as the direction of the relationship between the two. The direction is quantified using a scale ranging from −1 to +1. Subject actors were coded at three levels: at the level of their party membership; their function; and their individual name.² To illustrate the coding procedure, consider the following headline: ‘French Socialists say yes to European Constitution’. This is an example of an ‘actor–issue’ sentence, which is coded as a positive relationship (+1) between the actor (the French Socialists) and the issue (the European Constitution).

In addition to the press, the main television evening news programmes were also coded for one election in five of the six countries (see last column of Table 1). This allowed me to check to what extent the results were press-specific or generalizable to all news media, which is important, given the general expectation that television news programmes tend to adopt more personalized coverage than the press. Table 3 provides an overview of the number of core sentences that I coded per country, type of source and decade.

Table 3.

Number of sentences coded: per country, source type and decade

	1970		1990		2000
Country	Quality	Tabloid	Quality	Tabloid	Quality	Tabloid	TV	Total
F	1585	691	3425	1946	1591	1847	643	11728
D	594	385	1534	1454	2727	2745	508	9947
A	660	568	1637	1624	2813	2361	1047	10710
UK	487	446	1564	1284	1755	1496	.	7032
NL	1323	494	1203	1082	3329	3300	713	11444
CH	407	139	1775	1436	4654	1857	106	10374
Total	5056	2723	11138	8826	16869	13606	3017	61235

Notes. A = Austria; CH = Switzerland; F = France; D = Germany; NL = Netherlands; UK = United Kingdom.

Results

Personalization in general

The actors coded were either parties or individual representatives of parties. The sources either referred to the parties as organizational units or to the individual politicians representing the various parties. I use the share of sentences, where the subject actor is an individual politician, and not a party organization, as key indicator for the general personalization of election coverage by the media.³ Table 4 presents the corresponding data. The first line of Table 4 shows the overall differences between countries with respect to the personalization of subject actors in general. As we can see from this table, the share of individual personalities – that is, the degree of general personalization of campaign coverage – varies enormously from one country to the other, and it does so more or less as expected based on the institutional differences between the national political systems. Thus France’s presidential elections give rise to a much greater focus on individual personalities than the parliamentary elections in the other five countries. The degree of personalization for the French presidential elections of the 1990s and 2000s reaches more than 90 per cent.⁴ Moreover, the degree of personalization is lowest in the Netherlands and Switzerland, the parliamentary democracies without a Chancellor system and the country with a directorial system. Somewhat unexpectedly, however, the personalization as measured by this indicator is higher in Germany and Austria than in the UK. These results largely confirm the country differences previously found for the three countries covered by Dalton et al. (2000: 52).⁵

Table 4.

Personalization: share of individual personalities among the subject actors by country

Share of individual actors	F (1990s/ 2000s)	D	A	UK	NL	CH	Total	Chi² test p value	gamma
All newspapers	92.9	68.0	65.2	53.9	47.9	41.9	61.0	0.0	−0.45
Quality	92.8	61.8	56.4	43.9	45.1	29.6	48.9	0.0	−0.52
Tabloids	93.1	68.5	66.3	64.2	51.3	49.1	65.0	0.0	−0.37
Delta (t-q)	0.3	6.7	9.9	20.2	6.2	19.5	15.7
TV¹	98.0	74.4	54.4		52.5	39.6	66.1	0.0	−0.55
Newspapers¹	96.0	73.9	71.6		62.2	46.0	72.0	0.0	−0.57
Delta (tv-newsp.)	2.0	0.5	−17.2		−9.7	−6.4	−5.9

¹Only for the years, where the two types of information are available (see Table 1).

As is shown in the second part of Table 4, we find similar country-specific differences in the quality newspapers and in tabloids. Although the degree of personalization is higher in tabloids than in the quality press, the differences between the two types of newspapers are surprisingly small, except for the UK and Switzerland, where the campaign coverage in tabloids is much more personalized than in the quality press.

Third, the results for the television news programmes (where available) are quite similar to the ones of the newspapers. To the extent that there are differences, the television news programmes, again surprisingly, provide a less personalized coverage of national election campaigns than the press. This is a first indication that the results, which are essentially based on the press, may be generalized to the electronic news media.

Figure 1 displays the development over time (from the 1970s to the 2000s) of the key indicator. Except for the Netherlands, there is virtually no time trend with respect to this key measure of personalization. The results for the Netherlands confirm Karvonen’s (2010) analysis, for whom this country was a ‘mixed-positive’ case. In the 1970s, campaign coverage in the Netherlands was even less personalized than in Switzerland. By the 2000s, however, it has become more personalized than the coverage of Swiss campaigns, without quite reaching the levels of personalization of the other countries. The other mixed-positive case in Karvonen’s analysis – the UK – does not display any trend toward an increasing personalization of campaigns. The ‘mixed-negative’ characteristics of Austria and Germany, however, are confirmed.

Figure 1.

Country-specific trends of personalization, percentages¹

Taking a closer look at the development over time in the quality papers and in tabloids, we find virtually no trend for quality newspapers, while tabloids overall slowly move in the direction of increasing personalization (results not shown here). There are, however, again some country-specific differences. The Netherlands are notable for the fact that the increase in personalization has occurred both in the quality press and in tabloids. In the other countries, trends are at best very weak, even for tabloids, and differences between the quality press and tabloids are not very pronounced. The UK and Switzerland differ from the rest because, in these two countries, the quality press is characterized by a consistently lower level of personalization than the tabloids.

Concentration of personalization

Next let us consider the extent to which media coverage is concentrated on a limited number of individual personalities. Table 5 provides the relevant figures. The first line in this table corresponds to the overall figures presented in Table 4. It shows the general personalization in the six countries. The second and third line in Table 5 present the corresponding shares respectively of the 10 and the two most frequently mentioned personalities. Figure 2 plots the corresponding results. As these results indicate, the overall degree of personalization is closely related to its concentration on a limited number of personalities: the more personalized a system in general terms, the more it also tends to concentrate the media’s attention on a limited number of politicians. Thus, the French presidential system focuses almost all of the newspapers' attention on the top 10 presidential candidates, and more than 40 per cent on the top two. Without exception, the top two most frequently mentioned personalities are the candidates of the two major parties (analysis not shown here).

Table 5.

Concentration of personalization on top leaders, by country

	F(1990s/2000s)	D	A	UK	NL (2006)	CH	Total	gamma
Share of personalities	92.9	68.0	65.2	53.9	47.9	41.9	61.0	−0.45
Top 10's share	81.3	40.6	45.1	38.7	19.8	18.2	39.4	−0.52
Top 2's share	44.8	17.7	17.1	21.8	2.3	5.4	17.0	−0.54
N	8,809	9,439	9,663	7,032	10,731	10,268	55,942

Figure 2.

Concentration of personalization by country

Compared to the French presidential election campaigns, all the campaigns in parliamentary systems are not only much less personalized, but they also concentrate attention much less on a limited number of candidates. Among the parliamentary systems, the British majoritarian system, which is characterized by campaigns that are less personalized overall than German and Austrian campaigns, places a somewhat greater focus on the top two candidates. Thus, although the personalization of the British system is less pronounced than I expected, this system does focus its attention more than other parliamentary systems on the top two candidates in national elections. Without exception, the two most frequently covered politicians in Britain are the leaders of the two major parties. In Germany, too, the two most frequently covered candidates are the leaders of the two most important parties. In Austria, however, this is not always the case.

The attention of the media is least concentrated in the Netherlands and in Switzerland. While this was to be expected for the Swiss case, the low level of concentration of media attention for the Dutch case is quite surprising, given that the entire country constitutes one single electoral district. Note, however, that, in the case of the Netherlands, we only have detailed data on the individual personalities for the 2006 elections. In this particular Dutch election, the leaders of the major parties also figure at the top of the list. In the Swiss case, we find members of the federal government, national party leaders, as well as regional candidates among the top 10 as well as among the top two personalities. The presence of the members of government in the Swiss case is particularly intriguing, because they are not elected by the popular vote, nor are they the heads of their respective parties. In this respect, too, the comparison of the results based on the press are largely representative for the television news programmes (results not shown here).

Table 6 presents the overall trends for the attention to the top 10 and top two personalities for all countries taken together, and Figure 3 illustrates the country-specific development over time. There are no overall trends discernible here either. This lack of any discernible overall trend undermines the presidentialization thesis. The Netherlands are again the only country where we find some weak trend towards greater concentration. In Germany, there is only an imperceptible increase in the degree of concentration of media coverage on the top two candidates in the 2000s; that is, the impact of the introduction of televised debates between the top candidates is hardly confirmed at all. My rough indicator does not pick up the ‘significant increase of attention for the candidates' observed by Reinemann and Wilke (2007: 102f): I shall come back to this point in the concluding discussion. In France, we even find a net decline of the concentration of the media coverage from the 1990s to the 2000s, which is most likely a result of the multiplication of the presidential candidates above all in the 2002 presidential elections (with the well-known consequences), but also in the corresponding 2007 elections.

Table 6.

Development of concentration of personalization, percentage shares

	1970s	1990s	2000s	total	gamma
Top 10	31.0	47.6	35.7	39.5	−0.11
Top 2	12.4	22.3	14.7	17.2	−0.12
N	5,503	19,964	30,475	55,942

Figure 3.

Development of concentration of personalization, by country: percentage shares

Focus on government

One might argue that the presidentialization thesis does not necessarily predict a general increase in the concentration of the media’s attention on top candidates. Instead, one might argue, it suggests that the chief executive or other members of the government get increasing attention, at the detriment of politicians from the opposition parties. According to this more specific version of the presidentialization thesis, I would above all expect a greater extent of personalization among the incumbent parties than among the parties who are in the opposition, and also a greater degree of concentration of the personalization among the incumbent parties. Compared to opposition leaders, the members of government and the chief executive can be expected to benefit from an ‘incumbent bonus' (e.g. the German ‘chancellor bonus'; Reinemann and Wilke, (2007: 103). The members of government often make the news and are highly visible to the general public. Moreover, the internationalization (Europeanization) of policy-making increases the relative domestic influence of governments; that is, it shifts power to the heads of governments, some of their ministers and key advisers, and thereby reinforces the trends of ‘deparliamentarization’ and ‘presidentialization’ noted earlier. In other words, the presidentialization thesis predicts above all an ‘incumbent bonus' with respect to both personalization in general and its concentration in particular.

What we find with respect to personalization in general (Table 7) is, indeed, something like an ‘incumbent bonus', given that the media’s campaign coverage of the parties in government is more personalized than its coverage of the parties in opposition. Moreover, the personalization on the government side is more concentrated on a few selected personalities than on the opposition side. We find this pattern in all six countries; that is, independently of the overall level of personalization in a given country. The members of government are more likely to be visible in public as individual actors than the members of the opposition, who tend to be more anonymous. The ‘incumbent bonus' is a resource shared by all the governing parties who benefit from the fact that the members of government often make it into the news and are individuated by the media. In France, the concentration on the president on the government’s side is quite impressive, given that the president (the presidential candidate of the government’s side) gets 80 per cent of all the mentions for the party actors in the government’s camp. The concentration of the personalization among government personnel is also impressive at the other end of the scale: in Switzerland, on the government’s side, there is just as much personalization as in the Netherlands or the UK. The opposition actors, by contrast, are much less personalized in Switzerland. The Swiss opposition parties remain largely anonymous. They are almost absent among the top 10 actors and totally absent among the top two actors. One way to interpret the Swiss results is that the grand coalition government tends to reduce the members of the opposition parties to anonymity. This is confirmed by the Austrian case, where two grand coalitions governed in the 1990s: in the 1994 and 1999 Austrian election campaigns, both top two personalities belonged to the government camp.

Table 7.

Personalization of government and opposition actors, by country

Share of persons	Opp	Govt	Total	Gamma
F(1990/2000)	92.1	95.1	92.9	0.25
D	61.8	75.7	68.0	0.32
Austria	55.2	72.6	65.2	0.36
UK	47.1	59.7	53.9	0.25
NL	34.8	58.4	47.9	0.45
CH	16.8	54.0	41.9	0.71
Overall	54.8	66.0	60.6	0.23

Moreover, in line with the presidentialization thesis, the difference in personalization of government and opposition actors has been increasing over time.⁶ Figure 4 shows the corresponding results. As these graphs indicate, the increasing personalization gap between the government and opposition parties is, however, not a result of an increasing personalization of the incumbents. With the exception of the Netherlands, the personalization of government actors has remained quite constant. What has actually happened to increase the gap is that the personalization of opposition actors has decreased, with the exception of the Netherlands, where it has also increased (although at a much slower pace than the personalization of the government actors). We obtain largely similar results for the concentration of coverage of the top 10 and the top two personalities (not shown here). In other words, what has in fact happened is an increasing relative neglect of the personalities from the opposition parties. This is not exactly a ‘presidentialization’ effect, but it is the closest to such an effect we find in the news media’s coverage of election campaigns.

Figure 4.

Development of personalization of government and opposition actors, percentages by decade

Charismatic personalities and special circumstances

The effect of charismatic personalities can be studied by looking more closely at the top two personalities in each election. Table 8 presents some relevant data for each one of the six countries. In France, the top two personalities were always the top candidates of the two major blocks. In each one of the presidential elections covered in France, the candidate of the left received more attention than the candidate of the moderate right. This may have more to do with the somewhat unbalanced reporting of the newspapers selected for this study (Le Monde and Le Parisien) than with the special characteristics of the personalities involved. Turning to Germany, the results (reported in Table 8b) are somewhat more telling: Helmut Kohl at first gets more attention whether he is in opposition (against Helmut Schmidt in the 1976 elections) or in government (against Rudolf Scharping in the 1994 elections). But when he was finally beaten, he got less attention than his opponent Gerhard Schroeder. Similarly, Gerhard Schroeder got more attention than his opponent – in opposition against Kohl (1998 election) and in government against Stoiber (2002 election), but ended up by getting less attention than the challenger who finally beat him in the elections in 2006 (Angela Merkel). This combination of results suggests that the great communication skills of both Kohl and Schroeder contributed to their resonance in the media (and to their eventual success).⁷ But it also suggests that such skills may not guarantee attention forever; they may wear out and lose their resonance in the long run.

Table 8.

The effect of specific personalities and circumstances, percentage shares of top two mentions

a) effect of president in France
	1988	1995	2007	2002
President’s party	Mitterand	Jospin	Sarkozy	Chirac
Opposition	Chirac	Chirac	Royal	Jospin
Share of presid.	55.8	52.4	48.7	44
N	1,333	1,327	600	688
b) effect of chancellor in Germany
	1976	1994	2002	1998	2005
Chancellor	Schmidt	Kohl	Schroeder	Kohl	Schroeder
opposition	Kohl	Scharping	Stoiber	Schroeder	Merkel
Share of Chanc.	47.4	58.1	61	43.5	48.7
n	171	222	556	193	532
c) effect of PM in UK
	1974	1992	2001	1997	2005
PM	Heath	Major	Blair	Major	Blair
opposition	Wilson	Kinnock	Hague	Blair	Howard
Share of PM	53	59.1	61	37.3	67.9
n	181	215	236	373	527
d) effect of chancellor in Austria
	1975	1994	2002	1999	2006
Chancellor	Taus	Vranitzky	Schuessel	Klima	Schuessel
opp/No 2	Androsch	Busek	Gusenbauer	Schuessel	Westenthaler
Chanc share	44.7	100	56.2	100	100
n	271	244	434	337	362
e) effect of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands
	opp	govt		gamma
NL-1970s	8.7	11.2		0.14
NL-1990s	14.6	22.5		0.26
NL-2002	44.8	21.5		−0.46
NL2003/2006	10.9	31.5		0.58
f) effect of grand coalition in Switzerland
	1975	1991	1999	1995	2003	2007
No 1	Honegger	Stich	Couchepin	Dreifuss	Staehelin	Blocher
No 2	Hubacher	Ledergerber	Blocher	Leuenberger	Couchepin	Maurer
Share of grand c.	100	100	100	100	100	100
n	61	78	48	71	65	234

The Austrian case, by contrast, shows that it is possible for a top politician to get more attention over time: Wolfgang Schuessel did not prevail at first (in the 1999 elections against Viktor Klima), but in both of the following elections he obtained more attention than his direct opponents. For Britain, the results can be taken as a confirmation of the great communication skills of Tony Blair, who not only got more attention than his greatest competitor while in the opposition (against John Major in 1997), but also as Prime Minister in 2001 and 2005 (against William Hague and Michael Howard).

The Dutch case is particularly interesting in the present context, although we do not have data on the top two personalities for this particular case. We only have a proxy for the top 10 candidates (which consists of the score of the Prime Minister and party leaders taken together). If we compare the attention paid to the top leaders of the government and opposition parties in the 2002 election with that of the other elections, we note that, exceptionally, the opposition candidates got much more attention in 2002 than in the previous or subsequent elections. This is, of course, the effect of Pim Fortuyn, who irrupted on the Dutch political scene at the end of 2001 and who focused much of the media attention during the campaign in early 2002 on himself. His effect is enormous and shows what a difference a highly charismatic personality can make in an election campaign.

Pim Fortuyn has only been the most spectacularly successful of the populist leaders of the new radical right. Jean-Marie Le Pen, his equivalent in France, was number four on the list of the most often-mentioned personalities in three out of the four last presidential elections in France, and once (in 1992, when he obtained his greatest success) he was number three. Jörg Haider, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ [Freiheitliche Partei Österreich]) rose from fifth place in 1994 to third place in 1999, before dropping to sixth and tenth place in 2002 and 2006. In spite (or because) of his decline, the populist right was very conspicuous among the top 10 personalities in 2006, with Westenthaler and Strache from the Federation Future of Austria (BZÖ [Bündnis Zukunft Österreich]) in second and fourth place, and Martin in eighth place. Christoph Blocher, the leader of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), got on the list in ninth place in 1991 already. He rose to fifth place in 1995, second place in 1999, before disappearing from the top 10 in 2003, when he adopted a low profile. In 2007, however, he occupied the first place followed by the president of his party in second place. Even if, compared to other countries, the share of the top two personalities in Switzerland is very low, data used for this study apparently are very sensitive to strategic moves of the various parties. In 2007, the Swiss populist party organized its entire campaign around its leader with the slogan ‘choose SVP to reinforce Blocher’. However, although they mirror the personalization of the 2007 SVP campaign, the media data give only a pale rendering of the degree to which the party personalized its campaign in this election: it covered the whole country with gigantic posters showing its leader and the corresponding slogan.

More systematically, Table 9 shows that, in the four countries, where the populist right became a strong presence, its media coverage in the electoral campaigns has not been more personalized than the media coverage of the major parties who habitually govern. The exception is the Netherlands in the 2002 election, where, as a result of the strong presence of Pim Fortuyn, the degree of personalization of the populist right is more important than that of all the other parties. A more detailed analysis of the concentration of the Dutch campaign on the top 10 personalities (not shown here) indicates that in 2002, indeed, the high degree of personalization of media coverage of the populist right was a result of the concentration on Pim Fortuyn. For the Swiss populist right, the more detailed analysis also indicates the exceptional personalization of the 2007 SVP-campaign. Before, the SVP typically campaigned on substantive issues, and did not focus much on its charismatic leader.

Table 9.

Degree of personalization by party families in the four countries with a populist right, share of individual personalities (1990s and 2000s only)

Country	Rad left	Greens	Socdem	Liberals	Chrisdem	Pop right	Total
France	87.0	84.4	94.2	94.3	96.2	95.9	93.9
Austria	—	48.5	66.4	56.3	72.3	62.6	65.3
NL 2002	29.3	49.4	62.0	60.9	34.8	75.8	62.2
NL 2003/6	27.1	47.3	57.6	64.8	65.7	63.9	61.3
CH	50.3	25.3	58.7	51.1	46.8	48.4	49.5

Note. No radical left in Austria.

Conclusion

As I observed at the outset, the empirical evidence concerning the ‘personalization of politics' thesis is at best mixed. My own results serve to reinforce this overall rather sceptical conclusion. This analysis has shown that, in the national elections in the six countries covered, there is neither a general trend towards increasing personalization in media coverage of electoral campaigns, nor a trend towards increasing concentration of the media coverage on a limited set of top political leaders (‘presidentialization’). Among the six countries, the exception to this overall assessment is the Netherlands, where I found both a trend towards increasing personalization in general, and an increasing concentration of the public attention on a limited set of personalities. The Dutch trend is already noticeable in the 1990s and cannot be attributed, as some may have expected, to the campaign by Pim Fortuyn in 2002.

There is no generally-increasing predominance of populist leaders in the media coverage of national election campaigns in the countries under study. There are, however, differences between elections in one and the same country with respect to the resonance of certain personalities in the media – differences which are probably due to the variable communication skills (charisma) of the top leaders facing each other.

The ‘presidentialization thesis' finds some support in the data used here, but in a rather unexpected way. In line with this thesis there is, indeed, an ‘incumbent bonus' for the parties in government with respect to the personalization of their candidates. There is also an increasing gap between the personalization of the incumbent government parties and the opposition parties. What has occurred is, however, not an increasing focus on chief executives and members of government, but an increasing relative neglect of the personalities of the opposition parties. This is not exactly a ‘presidentialization’ effect, but it is the closest to such an effect we were able to find.

Rather than a trend towards 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. As expected, these country-specific differences largely depend on the institutional arrangements of the respective political systems, with the overall regime type and the electoral system accounting for most of the differences. We find the same country-specific differences in the quality press, in tabloids and in television news programmes, and, surprisingly, in a given country the different media outlets (except for tabloids in the UK and Switzerland) do not much differ with respect to overall levels of personalization or with respect to its concentration on a few top politicians.

The fact that the present results do not depend on the type of media is quite reassuring as far as their validity is concerned. However, the absence of any clear-cut trend in the present data may be related to the indicators I used – the share of individual politicians among all subject actors, and the corresponding shares of the top 10 and the top two most frequently mentioned personalities. Even if the personalization thesis does not apply in terms of an increasing focus on individual personalities, it may still hold in terms of the evaluation criteria that are applied to the politicians. Thus, Reinemann and Wilke (2007), in their analysis of the effect of televised debates between top candidates in Germany, did not find much of an increase in the focus on the top two candidates either. However, they found a substantial increase in the number of evaluative statements about the candidates, and a change of the criteria by which the candidates were judged in those statements. Similarly, while the already-mentioned Swedish study reported by Karvonen (2010: 94) did not find any change in the amount of attention atttributed to party leaders by the quality press, it found a striking change in the way the quality press presented party leaders: it basically shifted to the dramatized mode of presentation that has always been prevalent in the tabloid press. This suggests that, in future research, we should pay closer attention to the distinction between ‘personalization’ in terms of focusing on individual politicians, and ‘personalization’ in terms of the ‘spectacularization’ of political communication formats – an element of communication style that also has its roots in the commercialization of the media and that marries the language of politics with that of advertising, public relations (PR) and show business (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999). The study of personalization in terms of ‘spectacularization’ is likely to be more promising than the analysis of the focus on individual personalities pursued here.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the joint support of the German Research Foundation (SFB 536 – Project C5), and of the Swiss National Science Foundation (1214-68010.02 and 100012-111756/1+2). He would also like to thank Silke Adam, Daniele Albertazzi, Marc Helbling, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

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