Faces of Europe: Structural Drivers of Visual Personalization in Political Parties’ Facebook Campaigns
Melanie Magin
Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
Uta Russmann
Department of Media, Society and Communication, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Rossella Vulcano
ESPOL‐Lab, Université Catholique de Lille, France
Felix-Christopher von Nostitz
ESPOL‐Lab, Université Catholique de Lille, France
Anna-Katharina Wurst
Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich, Germany
Katjana Gattermann
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Laura Alonso-Muñoz
Department of Communication Sciences, Universitat Jaume I, Spain
Delia Cristina Balaban
Department of Communication, Public Relations, and Advertising, Babeș‐Bolyai University, Romania
Paweł Baranowski
Institute of Journalism and Social Communication, University of Wrocław, Poland
Krisztina Burai
Institute for Political Science, ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary / Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
Jean Claude Cachia
Institute for European Studies, University of Malta, Malta
Tomaž Deželan
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Michal Garaj
Institute of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia
Babette Hermans
Department of Communication Science, KU Leuven, Belgium
Konstantinos Kallinikos
Department of Communication and Digital Media, University of Western Macedonia, Greece
Elisa Kannasto
Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences, Finland
Simon Kruschinski
Department of Computational Social Science, GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany / Department of Data Services for the Social Sciences, GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
Georgios Lappas
Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich, Germany / Department of Communication and Digital Media, University of Western Macedonia, Greece
Sara Machado
Transdisciplinary Research Center for Culture, Space and Memory (CITCEM), University of Porto, Portugal
Alena Pospíšil Macková
Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Anamaria Dutceac Segesten
Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden
Ilva Skulte
Social Sciences Research Centre, Riga Stradiņš University, Latvia
Milica Vučković
Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Matt Wall
Department of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations, Swansea University, UK
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.
Keywords: election campaigning; European Parliament; social media; visual personalization
