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 conditions are designed accordingly with an additional control group; and respondents are randomly assigned.
A pilot study conducted with Dutch students serves as the basis for the full research design that will be implemented after the Italian elections in spring 2018. The findings will have important implications for research on the personalization of politics, and the study design represents a methodological contribution to experimental political science.
