Personalization of Politics On Facebook: Examining The Content and Effects of Professional, Emotional and Private Self-Personalization
Personalization of Politics On Facebook: Examining The Content and Effects of Professional, Emotional and Private Self-Personalization
Personalization of Politics On Facebook: Examining The Content and Effects of Professional, Emotional and Private Self-Personalization
To cite this article: Manon Metz, Sanne Kruikemeier & Sophie Lecheler (2019): Personalization of
politics on Facebook: examining the content and effects of professional, emotional and private self-
personalization, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1581244
a
Mannheim Center of European Social Research, Mannheim, Germany; bAmsterdam School of
Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; cDepartment of
Communication, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria
With the rise of social media, political communication has undergone a fundamental
change. Politicians permanently campaign for support from the electorate, often indepen-
dent from the electoral cycle. Social media provide the infrastructure for such permanent
campaigning by giving politicians the opportunity to directly create, choose, and send con-
tent to citizens (Larsson, 2015, 2016), thereby circumventing traditional mass media (Den-
nis, Chadwick, & Smith, 2016, p. 11). This ultimately creates a more personalized
environment, in which individual politicians’ profile themselves independent from their
political party. Consequently, scholars have documented a trend towards more individua-
lized campaign patterns in politics and media today (Vergeer, Hermans, & Sams, 2013).
Studies have started to examine the extent to which self-personalization occurs online,
and the consequences of self-personalized styles as a political tactic (McGregor, 2018).
First indications hint towards considerable amounts of self-personalization online (e.g.,
Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015; Small, 2010) with certain types of self-personalization
inducing citizen engagement both online (e.g., Bene, 2017; Borah, 2016) and offline (e.g.,
Kruikemeier, van Noort, Vliegenthart, & de Vreese, 2013).
However, while both the extent and consequences of online self-personalization have
been recurring subjects of interest, previous work has not frequently examined different
types of self-personalization present on social media. This study adopts the theoretical
conceptualization of Van Santen and Van Zoonen (2010) and Van Aelst, Sheafer, and
Stanyer (2012) who show that personalization is a multilayered concept.1 This under-
standing diverges from the traditional news media-oriented perspective seeing personali-
zation as the visibility of politicians at the expense of political parties (e.g., Holtz-Bacha,
Langer, & Merkle, 2014). So, to bridge the gap, we first conduct a manual content analysis
of politicians’ Facebook posts. Thereby, we take into account visual communication on
social media (Abidin, 2017; Bene, 2017) by examining self-personalization in both texts
and visuals. This is important as it has been suggested that visuals have the capacity to
easily transmit personalized communication (Parry, 2015). Secondly, we test the effects
of each self-personalization type (i.e., professional, emotional, private) on audience
engagement (i.e., sentiments, shares, and comments), which puts the results into a broader
perspective. Thus far, research has focused extensively on who uses what type of social
media with what kind of motivation and effort (e.g., Baxter & Marcella, 2012; Lappas
et al., 2016; Larsson & Skogerbø, 2018; Lilleker, Tenscher, & Štětka, 2015; Magin, Podschu-
weit, Haßler, & Russmann, 2017; Oelsner & Heimrich, 2015; Quinlan, Gummer,
Roßmann, & Wolf, 2017), providing us with a clear understanding of how political actors
deploy social media. Yet, we add to this, by taking into account the perspective of the audi-
ence, as this is examined far less often (expect for: Bene, 2017; Borah, 2016; Gerodimos &
Justinussen, 2015). Taken together, this study asks (a) to what extent different types of self-
personalization are present in political communication on Facebook, and (b) how self-per-
sonalization affects audience engagement online.
A more personalized communication style online closely fits the personalization typol-
ogies of Van Aelst et al. (2012) and Van Santen and Van Zoonen (2010), confirming others
who also note that personalization is a multi-layered concept (for an overview, see Langer
& Sagarzazu, 2018). While Van Aelst et al. (2012) have defined personalization as a two-
folded concept (i.e., individualization vs. privatization), the authors themselves accept and
state that behavioral aspects of personalization, such as emotions, are excluded from their
definition (Van Aelst et al., 2012, pp. 214–215). Moreover, their definition is less applicable
in online environments, since social media are, by nature, personalized tools that provide
individual politicians with their own communication channel (Ekman & Widholm, 2015;
Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, pp. 63–64; Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013). Following the
definition of Van Aelst et al. (2012), communication stemming from individual politicians
would always be identified as personalized communication. In contrast, the personaliza-
tion typology by Van Santen and Van Zoonen (2010) distinguishes between three content
dimensions: professional, emotional, and private communication. While professional per-
sonalization targets qualities and individual activities related to the official office,
emotional personalization puts the personal feelings of the politician to the forefront,
and private personalization can be identified as intimate information about the private
persona. This latter conceptualization is chosen in the present study, because it under-
stands personalization as individualized communication, but acknowledges the multidi-
mensionality of the theoretical concept. We acknowledge that Van Santen and Van
Zoonen (2010) examined television portraits, that is biographies produced by journalists,
which of course differs from politicians who create original content themselves on their
social media platforms. However, we believe that the conceptualization is inclusive and
encompasses the most important aspects of online personal narratives (which is also
shown in previous work, see Kruikemeier, 2014). Van Santen and Van Zoonen argue
that it is ‘useful to distinguish between different foci of personal narratives, because
they have different relevance for the political content … ’ (p. 64). Fewer studies focus
on the actual communication styles of politicians and, by adopting this conceptualization
of Van Santen and Van Zoonen (2010), we examine different aspects of these communi-
cation styles and investigate their relevance to the political performance of politicians.
Communication that is focused at politicians’ competence, such as their professional
activities, are relevant for their political performances. Politicians’ emotions say something
about how a politician feels about social and political issues. Politicians’ private life says
something about the person behind the political office (McGregor, 2018). We therefore
apply their personalization conceptualization but extend their work by examining perso-
nalization as a narrative stemming from the politician themselves on Facebook (following
McGregor, 2018) in contrast to media narratives stemming from journalists. However, we
also adapt McGregor’s work in so far that we use different levels of such self-
personalization.
All in all, since voters may be significantly affected by personal communication styles as
they increasingly rely on candidate-specific information to form political evaluations
(McGregor, 2018), and because different aspects of self-personalized communication
have different relevance for the political performance of politicians, we believe that the
definition by Van Santen and Van Zoonen (2010) is most appropriate to conceptualize
self-personalization on social media. Therefore, we differentiate between professional,
emotional, and private self-personalization in this study.
4 M. METZ ET AL.
However, image impression management has become more important with the rise of
digital networks (Marland, 2012) and visuals have the capacity to transmit personalized
communication easily (Parry, 2015). Both McAllister (2007) and Zamora (2010) suggest
that visuals render presenting concrete political personas much easier than abstract politi-
cal ideas; Loader, Vromen, and Xenos (2016) show that viewing politicians’ visuals on
social media can sketch a more human and humorous image. This claim is supported
by Filimonov et al. (2016), who find that personalization on Instagram accounts of Swed-
ish parties contained particularly high levels of personalization in visuals. Based on this
initial evidence, we can assume that self-personalization finds stronger portrayal in visual
communication. Moreover, as images have been argued to be especially helpful in trans-
mitting the full range of emotions and intimacy in a quick and easy manner (Samuel-
Azran et al., 2016; Schill, 2012), it seems plausible that particular forms of self-personali-
zation (i.e., emotional, private) are more represented in visuals than other forms of self-
personalization (i.e., professional). Due to the relative paucity of investigations, we pose
the following research question:
RQ1: Is self-personalization more present in posts including visuals than in posts without
visuals?
Method
The study draws on a quantitative content analysis of German parliament members’ Face-
book posts. These posts were collected over the course of the last two weeks in November
2016, which were initially identified as regular weeks with no major political events
happening.
While most research on personalized communication in online environments is located
in US-American or Dutch contexts, this study considers Germany, widening the cases
under investigation. While both US and Dutch politicians have been shown to be very
social media oriented (Netherlands: Graham, Jackson, & Broersma, 2016; Hermans &
Vergeer, 2013; US: Geber & Scherer, 2015) and particularly in the US the publication of
personal and especially private content is more normalized (Geber & Scherer, 2015),
the present study examines a political communication culture in which the adaption of
social media is not as widespread and in which sharing private perspectives is not as com-
mon (Geber & Scherer, 2015; Hermans & Vergeer, 2013). A second distinction from pre-
vious literature is the study’s timeframe. Studies discussing personalization focus almost
exclusively on immediate campaign periods (Sörensen, 2016), ignoring the potential to
shape impressions outside of election campaigns. We widen the perspective, acknowled-
ging that politicians today are under permanent campaign pressure (Larsson, 2015, 2016).
Thus, individual politicians also profile themselves in their work as governing or opposing
parliament members (Giasson & Small, 2017), shaping impressions that may impact citi-
zens’ voting decisions in the long run. Last, by examining Facebook, we focus on the plat-
form that has the highest adoption rates in Germany among private users (Tippelt &
Kupferschmitt, 2015) and politicians (Oelsner & Heimrich, 2015; Quinlan et al., 2017).
Sample
To select a subsample of all members of parliament, the ‘Spitzenkandidaten’2 of the sixteen
federal states were chosen. This approach was based upon two premises, confirmed in
multi-party systems: First, Lev-On and Haleva-Amir (2018) have shown that higher-
ranked candidates were more active on Facebook than politicians with lower ranks in
Israel. Second, Van Aelst, van Erkel, D’heer, and Harder (2017) showed that more power-
ful politicians in Belgium, such as party leaders and ministers, were most popular on Twit-
ter, and this popularity was mirrored in traditional mass media. Hence, we assume that
Spitzenkandidaten are more visible on Facebook, and thus reach a broader audience
with their online communication.
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 7
These politicians were then identified by extracting the ‘Landeslisten’3 of the national
elections in 2013 from those four parties represented in the 17th national parliament. A
total of 64 Spitzenkandidaten were identified, of which 38 were included in the final
sample.4 All Facebook posts were automatically extracted using the tool Facepager (Keyl-
ing & Jünger, 2017). Using Facepager, all data were collected simultaneously in order to
guarantee that potential changes in metrics over time (e.g., number of posts) could not
affect the results. In sum, 435 Facebook posts were collected and coded. For each post,
we collected sentiments (i.e., likes and emojis), shares and comments. Moreover, we
included a number of control variables that have been shown to contribute to Facebook
posts’ popularity (i.e., gender, age, party affiliation of the individual politicians and the
number of overall Facebook fans).
Operationalization
The self-personalization indicators were derived from Van Santen and Van Zoonen
(2010) and adapted to suit a social media context based on Filimonov et al. (2016),
Gerodimos and Justinussen (2015), Kruikemeier (2014), and Otto and Maier (2016).
Self-personalization levels were considered present when the post featured the individ-
ual politician explicitly (i.e., I-form, name or image of the politician). This approach
assured that party-centered communication (i.e., we-form or in the name of the
associated party) was not considered self-personalization. Text and visuals were
coded simultaneously. Due to the higher complexity of coding visuals, the codebook
included several instructions and examples for visual coding.5 A brief overview of
the coding scheme is presented in Table 1. Each indicator was first coded as present
(1) or absent (0). Scores of all indicators were summed and subsequently turned into
binary self-personalization indices (0 = self-personalization level not present, 1 = self-
personalization level present): Professional self-personalization (M = .33, SD = .47),
emotional self-personalization (M = .33, SD = .47) and private self-personalization
(M = .16, SD = .37).
Reliability
The coding of the self-personalization levels was performed by the first author of the study,
who trained one additional coder. A subsample of approximately ten percent from the
complete sample was drawn randomly to test the quality of the coding instrument.
Inter-coder reliability was assessed with two measures. Both Krippendorff’s Alpha (Kal-
pha) and the standardized Lotus Gold Standard (S-GS) by Fretwurst (2013)6 were calcu-
lated using SPSS version 23.0. Due to the explorative nature of the study and the skewed
dichotomous measurements, we consider the S-GS a more adequate measures of inter-
coder reliability for the present dataset, as more conservative measures are known for pun-
ishing data structures like ours (Aaldering & Vliegenthart, 2016). The results for pro-
fessional (Kalpha = .72, S-GS = .82), emotional (Kalpha = .70, S-GS = .82) and private
self-personalization (Kalpha = .69, std. S-GS = .89) are considered reliable. Given that
the S-GS is above .80 for all self-personalization levels and even the conservative Kalpha
values exceed .67 (Krippendorff, 2012), inter-coder reliability is considered acceptable.
Sample description
The median age in the sample is approximately 54: The oldest candidate in the sample was
73, the youngest 37 years old. Due to the aforementioned approach, there is a bias towards
more popular candidates. The distribution among the four parties represented in parlia-
ment is rather equal: Nine politicians from ‘CDU/CSU’, ‘SPD’ and ‘Gruene’ and with ele-
ven politicians slightly more from the ‘Linke’. The sample contains 19 male and 19 female
politicians. The distribution of female and male candidates is unequal across the four par-
ties. Strongest differences are found between ‘Gruene’ and ‘CDU/CSU’: the sample of the
Green party includes majorly female politicians, the Union parties ‘CDU/CSU’ on the con-
trary incorporate more male politicians.
Results
First, the levels of self-personalization in the collected Facebook posts were examined.
Table 2 shows qualitative examples of posts including either one of the personalization
levels. In line with H1, it was found that posts with professional self-personalization are
most common in the sample (33.3%, N = 145). Interestingly, the share of posts containing
emotional self-personalization is equally high (33.1%, N = 144).7 Posts with private self-
personalization are less represented in the sample (16.3%, N = 71).8 Given these results,
H1 can be confirmed: politicians’ online communication prominently features self-per-
sonalized elements, and this is true for both professional and emotional self-personaliza-
tion. In contrast, in our sample, politicians seem to be rather hesitant to share private
impressions and information on Facebook. This may be partly in line with previous
work which showed that German political websites were less personalized compared to
INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 9
Figure 1. Percent comparisons for professional (N = 145), emotional (N = 144) and private self-perso-
nalization (N = 71) on posts without and with visuals.
indicators.9 Partially confirming H2, we find that both emotional (b = .79, t(425) = 4.50, p
< .001) and private self-personalization (b = .57, t(425) = 2.10, p < .05) positively and sig-
nificantly impact sentiments. Moreover, emotional self-personalization exerts additional
positive effects on shares (b = .31, t(425) = 1.87, p < .10) and comments (b = .51, t(425)
= 3.21, p < .01). In line with H2, professional self-personalization does not affect audience
engagement. None of the control variables10 exert a significant effect on audience engage-
ment with the exception of the overall amount of Facebook Fanpage likes.11
Subsequently, we tested for interaction effects between self-personalization and post
type (i.e., text vs. text-visual). Our results indicate a clear pattern: Private self-personaliza-
tion negatively interacts with visuals on all audience engagement variables (bsentiments =
−1.26, t(424) = −2.67, p < .05; bshares = −1.15, t(424) = −1.75, p < .10; bcomments = −1.67, t
(424) = −3.29, p < .01). This negative interaction effect suggests that for posts not contain-
ing a visual, the inclusion of private elements induces more audience engagement, while
there is no interaction effect present if the post contains a visual. In sum, it seems that poli-
ticians’ impression management via Facebook positively affect audience online engage-
ment, if politicians are willing to present themselves in a more emotional and intimate
fashion.
rarely used. Future work should examine why emotional and private self-personalization
trigger audience engagement. One possibility may be that an increase in staged and pro-
fessionally created images online rises the demand for more natural images of politicians
as a counter-tactic (Enli, 2016). Thus, uploading a selfie of one’s morning run or speaking
from personal experience could contrast this highly professional environment by persuad-
ing audiences with authenticity (Enli & Skogerbø, 2013; Helms, 2012; Parry, 2015).
Second, as one of the first studies considering visual elements in politicians’ social
media use, this analysis shed light on the importance of visuals to promote personalized
communication styles. In the present sample, self-personalization was much more promi-
nently featured in posts including photos or videos, and this difference was present for all
three self-personalization types.
Last, it is important to consider regular terms of office more rigorously when discussing
personalization, as voters do not only evaluate politicians during the relatively short elec-
tion period, but also throughout their term of office (Giasson & Small, 2017). The study
has shown that self-personalization is much applied in regular government periods,
suggesting that self-personalization is more than an election campaign strategy.
Beside these theoretical and societal implications, our findings offer insights for political
marketers and politicians. Our analysis revealed that roughly 40% of the sample did not
offer a public Facebook account. These politicians miss out on the opportunity to gain
more control over their personal narratives. Several studies have shown that voters’ evalu-
ations of politicians’ characters impact their voting decisions (e.g., Funk, 1999; Hayes,
2005) and that also non-political character traits such as integrity play a role in the
decision-making process (e.g., Lavine & Gschwend, 2007; Olivola & Todorov, 2010). In
addition, recent political elections have highlighted the appeal of candidates such as Justin
Trudeau or Donald Trump who offer a more personal and ordinary and, therefore, auth-
entic image through social media (Enli, 2017; Lalancette & Raynauld, 2017). Taken
together, impression management via social media can help politicians to connect to citi-
zens on a more emotional and intimate level which may satisfy a growing demand for poli-
ticians to be ‘one of us’. Moreover, candidates perceived less newsworthy by traditional
media could benefit from the incorporation of social media by generating greater visibility
(Skovsgaard & Van Dalen, 2013). However, adapting to a rhetoric in which ‘style, looks
and visual performativity are central features’ (Ekman & Widholm, 2017) may also thrive
depoliticization. While many politicians today discuss and present their work on Facebook
sparking at least some debate about political issues, a shift towards more private and
emotional content could further prevent people from substantial political exchange in
the digital sphere. Still, self-personalization is an indispensable communication strategy
for politicians nowadays.
Notes
1. It should be noted that although these studies clarify the conceptual definition of personali-
zation, they do not measure the actual use by examining the actual presence of these types of
personalization.
2. The political candidates placed on top of the party lists (rank 1).
3. ‘Landeslisten’ are tied to the second vote in the German electoral system. In each federal state,
political parties select and place candidates in order on these party lists. German voters then
vote for a party list in their respective federal state (‘Landeslisten’, n.d.).
4. 5 politicians had left parliament by the time of the data conduction; 2 politicians did not
make it to parliament in the 2013 elections; 18 politicians did either not have a Facebook
account or only a private account and 1 politician was excluded due to posting inactivity
in the study’s timeframe. In sum, 26 out of 64 politicians were excluded from the sample.
5. First, to identify the politicians visually, an image of each politician was included in the codebook.
Second, using several examples we illustrated how to code visual posts. For example, an emotional
expression in an image or video was defined as a visible emotion (e.g., strong laugh, cry).
6. The gold standard instead of the Lotus was reported because the first author of the study
embodies the main coder, thus the second coder is compared to the gold standard set by
the first coder.
7. A Chi-square test of independence was performed on the binary variable professional and
emotional self-personalization. The relationship is insignificant X 2 (1, N = 435) = 2.29, p = .130.
8. Bivariate correlations show that none of the three self-personalization levels correlate signifi-
cantly with each other, indicating that professional, emotional and private self-personaliza-
tion are distinct forms of self-personalization.
9. Sentiments, shares and comments are strongly correlated: Sentiments and shares (r = .81, p
< .001), sentiments and comments (r = .876, p < .001) and shares and comments (r = .65, p
< .001). Results present variables without natural logarithms.
10. For the party dummies, the SPD served as the reference category in the analyses.
11. The effects of Facebook likes are statistically significant, but very small.
Notes on contributors
Manon Metz is a PhD Student at the Department of Political Sociology at the University of Man-
nheim, Germany. Her research interests include online political communication, interpersonal
communication and political polarization [email: [email protected]].
14 M. METZ ET AL.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Sophie Lecheler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7320-1012
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