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Personalisation in Political Campaigns: Evidence from Switzerland

Elections
Political Parties
Campaign
Qualitative
Evgeniya de Saint-Phalle
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Evgeniya de Saint-Phalle
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Anke Tresch
Université de Lausanne

Abstract

The personalization of election campaigns is often identified as an integral part in the worldwide process towards the professionalization of political campaigning (e.g., Farrell and Webb, 2000). Yet, much of the empirical literature is focused on the prominence of party leaders in “free” media coverage (e.g., Holtz-Bacha, 2014; Kriesi, 2012) or, less often, in “paid” political ads (e.g., Johnston and Kaid, 2002; Karvonen, 2010). The empirical evidence is mixed, showing no clear trend towards increased personalization, but with much variation across parties, elections, and countries. Our contribution focuses on the less studied “decentralized” personalization in the paid media (Balmas et al., 2014)—that is, individual candidates (other than the party leaders) in election ads—and aims at uncovering the role of the institutional context and party-organizational aspects. We look at two aspects of personalization—a formal dimension (layout, slogan, logo), and a content dimension (issues vs. image). Following Karvonen (2010), we distinguish between three types of election ads (party ads, candidate ads with several candidates, candidate ads with an individual candidate). We study the 2015 Swiss National Council elections, where the open ballot PR system should generally incentivize candidates to wage personal campaigns (e.g., Carey and Shugart, 1995), but to varying degrees depending on the size of the cantonal district. While we expect a lower share of individual candidate ads in large districts, we expect them to show stronger signs of personalization. However, we also anticipate party differences, depending on the extent of their resources and organization. We expect a higher share of individual candidate ads for more resourceful and leadership-dominated parties than for less resourceful and activist-dominated ones. Our analysis is based on a collection of more than 5000 political ads that were published during the 2015 election campaign in more than 50 daily and weekly national and cantonal print media.