The Art of Personalization -An explorative study of Swedish party leaders and their strategical communication

Abstract: This study explores the phenomenon of personalization within the political sphere. More specifically, it aims at exploring the strategical personalization of Swedish party leaders during the national election campaign of 2018. A further aim is to generate theoretical contributions to the area of personalization. As empirical material, the social media updates of three party leaders are analyzed under the period of 13 weeks before the election day, using a mixed methodological approach for an in-depth qualitative study. Regarding methodologies, grounded theory and coding is employed along with a rhetorical analysis that enable a systematic analysis of visual messages. The result indicates that the studied party leaders portrayed themselves as an integrated part of society, mediating a sense of presence and acknowledgement of the voters. In addition to this, the party leaders presented themselves as ordinary people and unified with the voters. The result also points to the practice of mediating a sense of social and cultural status, involving influencers in the communication and stepping into roles outside of the explicitly political arena. In terms of theoretical contributions, the generated theory contributes in the sense that it offers additional dimensions to the notion of "self-presentation", which is recognized as a common theme among prior theories. According to prior theories, individual politicians presents themselves as professional politicians and ordinary human beings. While the generated theory supports this perspective, it also highlights the aspect of intentionally integrating the voters into the self-presentations of individual politicians. Moreover, the generated theory emphasizes the perspective of social and cultural significance when regarding self-presentations of representatives.