Information Short-Cuts in European Union News: Can Media Personalization Increase Political Awareness?

The concept of the personalization of politics is receiving ever more scholarly attention in the literature on journalism, political communication and electoral behaviour. Some argue that personalization would undermine the quality of democracy with the attention being steered away from substantive issues, while others propose personalization may provide information short-cuts and hence have positive effects on political awareness. Yet, these claims have hardly been tested thus far. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine the effects of personalized news, i.e. news that focus on individual politicians, on political knowledge. The political context is European Union (EU) politics, which is characterised as rather complex and removed from citizens’ experiences with domestic politics. The focus lies on the European Parliament and its members (MEPs) and personalization here is understood as individualization, i.e. the increased focus on the individual MEP at the expense of the European Parliament as more abstract EU political institution. It is hypothesized that higher levels of individualization lead to higher levels of political knowledge. Furthermore, this effect is likely to be mediated by attitudes towards the EU and moderated by political interest. To test the hypotheses, the paper relies on a cross-country comparative survey experiment conducted with respondents from online panels in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy. This experiment is a two-stage experiment; and the dependent variable of interest is measured 24 hours after exposure to the stimulus material (and a first set of dependent variables). The latter is based on a manual content analysis of newspaper articles in each country, which provides a four-point scale operationalization of individualization ranging from no to full individualization. The experimental conditions are designed accordingly; and respondents are randomly assigned. The full research design will be implemented after the Italian elections in spring 2018. The findings will have important implications for research on media personalization effects.