Personalization of politics refers to a long-term process in which the focus shifts from collective institutions (parties, cabinets, parliaments) to individual politicians. It is a phenomenon that has received considerable attention at national-level politics. With this book, Katjana Gattermann brings this research agenda to EU politics.
Gattermann’s project is ambitious. It seeks to provide a comprehensive investigation of personalization of EU politics involving all aspects of the phenomenon: institutional personalization, media personalization, personalization of politicians’ behavior, and personalization of citizens’ attitudes and behavior. The book succeeds in providing solid empirical evidence on all these aspects of the broader phenomenon.
Turning first to institutional personalization, Gattermann analyzes the EU’s major institutional changes over the past three to four decades. Her focus is on factors such as the increasing powers of the European Parliament, the spitzenkandidaten process, the introduction of a permanent president of the European Council, and the “presidentialization” of the European Commission president. The argument is that these changes have eased the way for media personalization, which is analyzed at both the supranational and the national level. At the supranational level, Gattermann, studies coverage of EU news in the Financial Times and detects some tendency to personalize news about the European Commission, although the influence of institutional personalization is difficult to disentangle from the leadership styles of Commission presidents like Delors and Juncker. At the national level, Gattermann finds even less supporting evidence. She studies coverage of EU news in major newspapers in six member states: France, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, and Poland. However, she fails to find evidence to indicate increasing media personalization over time in these countries.
Turning to personalization of politicians’ behavior, Gattermann focuses on members of the European Parliament. She first studies personalized legislative behavior measured by trends in politicians’ use of parliamentary questions. According to this measure, legislative behavior has indeed become personalized over the last 20 years. This analysis is followed up by a study of the communicative behavior on Twitter of the members of the European Parliament. Gattermann finds that Twitter has become a standard tool of communication for the members of the European Parliament, regardless of nationality and national election system. Interestingly, Gattermann detects an interaction pattern in that personalized legislative and communicative behavior have become intertwined over time.
Turning finally to personalization of citizens’ attitudes and behavior, Gattermann expects personalization to have a humanizing effect on EU politics, as measured as positive effects on citizens’ political awareness, efficacy, and trust in the EU. However, based on Eurobarometer data, she finds little evidence of an increased level of citizens’ trust. And in a survey experiment involving citizens in three member states—Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy—she fails to detect an impact of individualized EU news on citizens’ external political efficacy and political awareness. In other words, this evidence suggests that personalization is not likely to humanize the EU. Another aspect of personalization of citizens’ attitudes and behavior is analyzed by Gattermann in a conjoint experiment conducted among German voters during the campaign before the 2019 European Parliament elections. This experiment tests whether voters prefer personalized news about EU politics, but again she fails to find any evidence that this is the case. On the contrary, voters seem to prefer news based on institutional sources in the EU.
In sum, Gattermann ends up with mixed evidence on the personalization of politics in the EU. There is some evidence in favor of institutional personalization, mixed but weak evidence of media personalization, considerable evidence in favor of personalization of politicians’ behavior, but very limited evidence in favor of personalization of citizens’ attitudes and behavior. What to make of this? In the concluding chapter, Gattermann provides an interesting discussion of whether the EU suffers from a “personalization deficit.” She argues that this is not the case and that the democratic functioning of the EU may actually be facilitated by citizens taking cues from EU institutions rather than individual EU politicians.
Gattermann’s findings rest on an impressive empirical basis. The reader is clearly in the hands of a “big data” expert. Her analysis of EU news coverage in the Financial Times is based on 267,726 articles, and the corresponding analysis of national EU coverage from six member states involves 687,946 articles. The study of personalization of politicians’ behavior includes 160,280 parliamentary questions and 1,377,574 tweets. To these big data resources, Gattermann adds survey experiments conducted in several different countries. These enormous datasets are expertly analyzed, and Gattermann provides a wealth of descriptive, correlational, and experimental evidence on the various aspects of personalization of EU politics. The empirical studies in the book are truly impressive.
However, Gattermann’s focus on data and data analysis comes with a price. Three issues are especially important. First, the theoretical part of the book is very brief, and there is clearly more work to be done here. Gattermann’s theoretical model, summed up in figure 2.1, is often vague. For example, the reader is told that institutional personalization can be both a “dimension” (p. 14) of the broader phenomenon of personalization, a “driver” (p. 15) of media personalization, and a “context” (p. 15) for other aspects of personalization. This is confusing. Second, given that Gattermann’s theoretical model consists of elements connected in reciprocal relationships, a general discussion of research design is warranted. How can the various relationships in the model be studied empirically, and what are the most promising analytical strategies? Gattermann leaves this question unanswered and proceeds directly to the book’s individual studies. Third, and finally, although Gattermann’s empirical studies are truly impressive, they do not address every issue. The theoretical concepts are studied by selected empirical indicators, the data come from selected member states, and the experiments necessarily provide case studies of selected interventions and leave questions of representativeness. A more elaborate final discussion of how the theoretical model has actually been investigated empirically would have been relevant.
These critical remarks, however, should not overshadow the book’s value. Gattermann has produced a landmark study on the personalization of EU politics. It is a must-read for everyone interested in the role of individual EU politicians and a highly informative book for those interested in EU politics in general.
