Getting Personal: Effects of Twitter Personalization on Candidate Evaluations

In: Politics & gender, Band 13, Heft 1, S. 1-25

Abstract

Personalization has cultivated a bad reputation in politics. Initially, scholarship on the personalization of politics focused on what was often called "candidate-centered" voting: the idea that citizens would vote based on a candidate's personality. Many scholars viewed this evaluative approach as irrational and heralded the value of issue stances over charisma (see Fenno 1978; Popkin 1991). Focusing on the personal, it seems, was problematic. Another iteration of the personalization in politics was also problematic and focused on the use of the "personal frame" in news coverage of women candidates. Such news coverage focused more on women's personalities and personal lives as compared to men's (e.g., Bystrom 1999; Devitt 1999). On its surface, such coverage does not appear detrimental. However, this framing would often emphasize women's roles as mothers and wives and use that framing to question women's experience, fitness for office, and whether they could juggle domestic and political responsibilities (Braden 1996). Personalization in both iterations elicited a sense of triviality: voters' focus on persona was deemed as a trivial way to form an opinion, and women candidates were trivialized via a focus on their personal, not political, lives.