Journal article 26 views 3 downloads
Faces of Europe: Structural Drivers of Visual Personalization in Political Parties’ Facebook Campaigns
Melanie Magin 
,
Uta Russmann ,
Rossella Vulcano ,
Felix-Christopher Von Nostitz ,
Anna-Katharina Wurst ,
Katjana Gattermann ,
Laura Alonso-Muñoz ,
Delia Cristina Balaban ,
Paweł Baranowski ,
Krisztina Burai ,
Jean Claude Cachia ,
Tomaž Deželan ,
Michal Garaj ,
Babette Hermans ,
Konstantinos Kallinikos ,
Elisa Kannasto ,
Simon Kruschinski ,
Georgios Lappas ,
Sara Machado ,
Alena Pospíšil Macková ,
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten ,
Ilva Skulte ,
Milica Vučković ,
Matthew Wall
,
Uta Russmann ,
Rossella Vulcano ,
Felix-Christopher Von Nostitz ,
Anna-Katharina Wurst ,
Katjana Gattermann ,
Laura Alonso-Muñoz ,
Delia Cristina Balaban ,
Paweł Baranowski ,
Krisztina Burai ,
Jean Claude Cachia ,
Tomaž Deželan ,
Michal Garaj ,
Babette Hermans ,
Konstantinos Kallinikos ,
Elisa Kannasto ,
Simon Kruschinski ,
Georgios Lappas ,
Sara Machado ,
Alena Pospíšil Macková ,
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten ,
Ilva Skulte ,
Milica Vučković ,
Matthew Wall
Media and Communication, Volume: 14, Start page: 11739
Swansea University Author:
Matthew Wall
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© 2026 by the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY).
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DOI (Published version): 10.17645/mac.11739
Abstract
Social media platforms have become central arenas for election campaigning, pushing political actors to adapt to their attention‑driven logics. One prominent strategy is visual personalization, reflecting the platforms’ person‑centered, image‑driven design. This study offers the first large‑scale, c...
| Published in: | Media and Communication |
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| ISSN: | 2183-2439 |
| Published: |
Cogitatio Press
2026
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa71903 |
| Abstract: |
Social media platforms have become central arenas for election campaigning, pushing political actors to adapt to their attention‑driven logics. One prominent strategy is visual personalization, reflecting the platforms’ person‑centered, image‑driven design. This study offers the first large‑scale, cross‑national analysis of how political parties across 23 EU countries strategically employed two dimensions of visual personalization—individualization and privatization—on Facebook during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign. It examines how their digital campaign output was shaped by two party‑level factors (populist vs. non‑populist status; government vs. opposition) and two country‑level factors (electoral systems; degree of authoritarianism). Based on a manual content analysis of 14,553 posts, we find that individualization was far more common than privatization and that party‑level characteristics exerted stronger influence than country‑level contexts. Populist and governing parties used more individualization. Privatization was more prevalent among non‑populist parties and in more liberal environments. These findings challenge assumptions about populist and authoritarian communication styles and make a theoretical contribution by demonstrating that visual personalization is a multidimensional phenomenon whose specific dimensions respond differently to structural incentives. Our results underscore the need to analytically separate individualization and privatization and to account for their distinct contextual drivers when assessing political personalization in digital environments. |
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| Keywords: |
election campaigning; European Parliament; social media; visual personalization |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
The International Visegrad Fund supported this article under project no. 22410053: EU Campaign Race in V4—Political Communication in Social Media before the 2024 EP Elections. Krisztina Burai’s research was supported by the Momentum program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA–ELTE TK Lendület “Momentum” PRISMA research project [LP2024‐2/2024]). Anna‐Katharina Wurst contributed as part of the junior research group DigiDeMo, funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt). Publication of this article in open access was made possible through the institutional membership agreement between the University of Innsbruck and Cogitatio Press. |
| Start Page: |
11739 |