Personalization is in the details

A case study of political personalization in American politics

Abstract

The process of political personalization (namely, politicians taking the center stage rather than political collectives) has been observed from many perspectives by scholars of political communication. A wide range of research measured whether politics was becoming personalized; however, these studies were largely data-driven. In this paper, I argue that in order to gain a fuller understanding of personalized politics, more nuanced analyses need to be conducted, as the detailed interpretation of political communication reveals aspects of political personalization which data-based approaches may overlook. The relevance of qualitative analysis in terms of the personalization of politics is interpreted through the use of first-person singular and plural pronouns in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential nomination acceptance speeches. The results show that despite a similar level of personalization in quantitative terms in the two speeches, a closer analysis of the texts reveals differences in terms of the semantic categories represented by first-person pronouns.