Despite growing research into the personalization of political news, we still know relatively little about the effects of such personalized political news on citizen awareness and attitudes. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining the effects of personalized news in the context of a low-information environment, namely European Union (EU) politics, which generally receive less attention in national media compared to domestic politics. Accordingly, citizens have comparatively little information which affects their political behaviour. This paper hypothesizes that higher degrees of personalization in EU news will lead to higher levels of awareness, greater political trust and higher levels of political efficacy with respect to EU politics.
To test the hypotheses, the paper proposes a novel research design, namely a cross-country comparative survey experiment that will be conducted with respondents from online panels in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy. To address issues of ecological validity, a content analysis of articles sampled on the European Parliament and its members from four major newspapers in each country (two political broadsheets, one financial newspaper and a tabloid) has been conducted over the course of the parliamentary year 2016/17. This content analysis provides a four-point scale operationalization of personalization indicating 1) no personalization, 2) little personalization (mentioning a politician), 3) some personalization (quoting a politician), and 4) full personalization, which additionally includes photographs of EU politicians. The experimental design is structured accordingly with no personalization as the control group to which respondents are randomly assigned.
For the Joint Sessions workshop, the paper will present results of a pilot study that will be conducted with Dutch students at the University of Amsterdam in January 2018. Thereby, the author seeks to contribute to the discussion of conceptual and methodological challenges related to the study of the personalization of politics before the full research design is implemented.
