Politicians, Personal Image and the Construction of Political Identity

A Comparative Study of the UK and Italy

C. Archetti

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137353429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Is the media obsession with image leading to a degeneration of politics? Are politicians more concerned with their appearances than with policy substance? Through the evidence provided by over 50 interviews with politicians across the UK and Italy - local councillors, MPs and MEPs - this book provides a very different picture of the world of politics than the one we often cynically imagine. By relying on extensive excerpts from frank and colorful conversations with the interviewees, the analysis develops a new multidisciplinary model to understand the 'mediatization' of politics and the way the personal image of elected representatives is constructed in the age of interconnectedness.

1

Image in Political Communication: Obscure Areas and Troubling Assumptions

Abstract: This chapter places the concern with the role of personal image and self-presentation of politicians into the context of political communication literature, particularly concentrating on the gaps and problematic assumptions of current research.

Keywords: democracy; media; media management; mediatization of politics; political communication; political marketing; politicians

Archetti, Cristina, Politicians, Personal Image and the Construction of Political Identity: A Comparative Study of the UK and Italy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0004.

Most studies that engage with the visual aspects of politics, like personal image, are located in the field of political communication. Indeed, the idea of an increasing importance of self-presentation in contemporary society underlies the whole debate about the effects of the development of communication technologies on the practice of politics. Although the balance of causality – is media shaping society or the other way around? – tilts in some approaches more towards the media technologies, and in others in the direction of social factors that have developed in the post-World War II context, there are two main common features to this approach. The first, as will be illustrated in the rest of this chapter, is the tendency to focus on structures – macro factors such as, to name a few, modernization, social change, education and technological advances in communication – at the expense of individual agency – people’s sense of identity, vision and understanding of the world, and personal history, for instance. The second is the broad agreement that politics has radically changed. This transformation has been referred to with a variety of labels. Jos de Beus (2011: 19) provides us with a fair number of them: ‘Mediacracy, government by spectacle, plebiscitary democracy, spectator democracy, telecracy, informational politics, public relations democracy, mobocracy, drama democracy, fan democracy, blockbuster democracy, media democracy, monitor democracy’. I am going to explain, first, the reasons Political Communication presents for the rise of image in the ‘new politics’; I will then offer a brief overview of the literature (or lack of it) about the visual dimension in politics.

Mediatized politics: a new era for political communication?

One common feature of the alleged ‘new politics’ is the ubiquitous media presence. Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz (1999) call it the ‘mediatization’ of politics. They explain how this is ‘politics that has lost its autonomy, has become dependent in its central functions on mass media, and is continuously shaped by interactions with the media’ (ibid.: 250). In this sense it is different from simply ‘mediated’ politics in which ‘mass media can be regarded as a mediating or intermediary agent whose function is to convey meaning from the communicator to the audience’ (ibid.: 249). In other words, mediatized politics has yielded to the ‘media logic’, particularly the ‘commercial logic of the media industry’ (ibid.: 251). Such adaptation affects the ‘outlook’ of political actors, the communication techniques that are used, and the contents of the political discourse (ibid.). These aspects appear to materialize, in practice, in the guise of politicians turning into performers who often recite carefully rehearsed scripts on a skilfully arranged stage. As Mazzoleni and Schulz continue:

the language of politics has been married with that of advertising, public relations, and show business. What is newsworthy, what hits the headlines, what counts in the public sphere or in the election campaign are communication skills, the style of addressing the public, the ‘look’, the image, even the special effects: All are typical features of the language of commercial media. (Ibid.)

Jay Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh (1999: 210–211), in explaining the coming about of this transformation of political communication, emphasize the reciprocal nature of the relations between media innovation and social change. They identify seven factors that, in their analysis, have contributed to reshaping Western democracies in the second half of the twentieth century: ‘modernization’, particularly the proliferation of lifestyles and the rise of identity politics; ‘individualization’: the increased importance of personal aspirations against the conformity to tradition, which also involves orientation towards self-gratification and consumerism; ‘secularization’, with its decreased reverence for official politics and, as immediate reflection of it, party identification; ‘economization’, or the subordination of most aspects of life to economic criteria of performance; ‘aestheticization’ – individuals’ increased concern with stylishness and image, especially in fashion and music; ‘rationalization’: the valuing of systematically gathered evidence, which supports politicians’ efforts to achieve persuasion through the techniques of market research and public relations; and again ‘mediatization’, this time as the ‘media moving toward the centre of the social process’. It is interesting to notice that even the factors that run most closely to the individual dimension, such as ‘individualization’ and ‘aestheticization’, are still approached at a collective level.

To these factors we can add, according to Paolo Mancini (1999: 241), a further process of the ‘professionalization’ of politics: traditional party bureaucrats committed both to a political ideology and the figure of the party leader are being increasingly replaced by professionals with technical skills, especially media and public relations experts, consultants and pollsters. This is the outcome, in his analysis, of three interconnected trends. The first is related to social change, particularly the weakening of the classes that constituted the core electoral basis of traditional early twentieth-century parties (such as the Catholic and the Social Democrats in Western Europe). The second is the development of education and scientific enterprise, in turn fuelling the availability of a whole market of professionals and technicians. Connected to this, technological development, especially in communications, has led to a process of ‘homogenisation and globalization’ on a worldwide scale (ibid.). Within such a context, as Mancini explains, ‘television, which became the only possible way to reach an electorate spread over an enormous distance following the deurbanization process, and then the computer have offered parties and candidates a great opportunity for communication, finding potential voters, organizing campaigns, and solving policy problems’ (ibid.). The third cause of the professionalization of politics, for him, is the (not better explained) ‘growing detachment of citizens from politics’ (ibid.).

Within this perspective, which might be painted with slightly different strokes but is largely shared by other authors in the field (see contributions in Kees Brants and Katrin Voltmer 2011b, for instance), the weakening of the traditional party structure plays an important part in the transformation of political communication. The alleged disappearance of the hierarchical apparatus bridging the local to the national (see also Mancini 2011, about the Italian case), in fact, leads to a greater reliance by political actors on communication technologies for engaging with citizens at a distance:

The weakening of the party structures undermined the party’s access to the vital information and two-way contact with voters formerly provided by the party organization. Polls and, more recently, focus groups have presented an alternative to that dense network of interpersonal relationships and section meetings that once were the backbone of the mass parties and circulated information, opinions, emotions and perceptions. (Mancini 1999: 239)

It is not difficult to see how personal image and self-presentation become crucial in a context in which direct contact with a politician is (allegedly) lost, voters are more volatile, and parties have to rely on mass media, mainly television, to convey their message to the electorate. In the words of Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999: 256): ‘The crisis of the parties has only expanded the political function of the mass media’. In turn, this trend leads to a ‘personalization’ of politics, where campaigning is candidate-centred (Manin 1997 219–221). Brought to the extreme, this could lead to what Mazzoleni (1995: 315) calls a ‘videocracy’ or ‘democracy by the [visual] media’.

Research gaps

Although personal image and self-presentation constitute essential aspects of the ‘new politics’, there is very little research about them. Some studies address the question of the impact of political candidates’ image on electorate’s preferences (Sigelman et al. 1986; Falkowski and Cwalina 2002; Cwalina, Falkowski and Lee Kaid 2005; Hamermesh 2006; Banducci et al. 2008; Chiao, Bowman and Gill 2008; Cwalina and Falkowski 2008; Stuntz-Tresky 2009; Lawson et al. 2010). While these pieces of research are able to establish which visual aspects of some candidates’ images are most appealing to the electorate (mainly in terms of facial characteristics), their narrow focus – including the fact that these studies are almost exclusively based on quantitative surveys and experiments – does not allow them to examine more deeply either the mechanisms through which image mediates a political meaning or the complex ways in which visual messages are interpreted by audiences beyond their immediate effect on electoral preference. Studies in political marketing, as it has also been observed within the field (Henneberg 2008; Harris and Lock 2010), tend to have a narrow focus on the political campaign application of marketing techniques (Butler and Collins 1994; O’Cass 1996; Landtsheer, de Vries and Vertessen 2008; Smith 2009; for the limitations of this approach, see O’Shaughnessy 2001). They tend to approach the issue of politicians’ image within the narrow parameters of commercial branding (White and de Chernatony 2002; Schneider 2004; Smith 2009), often understood as the effective selling of a political ‘product’ (O’Shaughnessy 1990; Lees-Marshment 2001; French and Smith 2008; for the limitation of the comparison between politics and the selling of a product, see Lock and Harris 1996). These studies also focus almost exclusively on political campaigning at election times.

Beyond electoral campaigning, it is possible to observe a widespread interest in political leaders and their media management efforts in dealing with the media, especially in getting their ‘message’ across and controlling the ‘story’ – what is normally called ‘spin’ (Grattan 1998; Kurtz 1998; Gaber 2000; Bennett and Entman 2001; Jones 2002; Campbell 2007; Moloney 2006). This means that the attention is mainly directed at rhetoric. The focus on this kind of content is such that, even in studies about ‘image’, the analysis is still about text (media coverage in the case of Kotzaivazoglu 2005 and Stuntz-Tresky 2009).

A further branch of research has examined the parallels between mediatized politics and popular culture (van Zoonen 2005; Mazzoleni and Sfardini 2009; Van Zoonen, Coleman and Kuik 2011), particularly between the engagement of the public with reality television (example of studies of Big Brother are: Coleman 2003; Cardo 2011) and voting (especially by young people).

When the field of political communication attempts to address image within the broader conceptual framework of identity construction, it does so through the lens of cultural studies. John Corner and Dick Pels (2003b), in an edited collection titled Media and the Restyling of Politics aim to engage with the ‘aesthetics of the political self’ – what they call ‘political style’ (Corner and Pels 2003a). The contributing chapters, however, not only remain rather abstract (Ankersmit 2003; Pels 2003; Corner 2003) but also end up conforming with the main existing avenues of research – again the analysis of political campaigning (Bennett 2003), the connections of political communication with popular culture (Simons 2003; Street 2003; Van Zoonen 2003) and political marketing (Scammell 2003). An exception in this respect is the excellent study by Richard Fenno (1978) Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. In this book, the author examines in-depth through participant observation the activities of 18 congressmen in their home districts between 1970 and 1977. Such activities, which he calls ‘home-style’, involve ‘the congressman’s allocation of his personal resources and those of his office ... the congressman’s presentation of self to others ... the congressman’s explanation of his [participants were all men] Washington activity to others’ (ibid.: 33, emphasis in original). The investigation presented in this book has taken inspiration from Fenno’s. I will return to this shortly in the methodology section (Chapter 2).

Overall there are only isolated exceptions to the general trends that have been described. They include the now ancient The Politician; His Habits, Outcries, and Protective Coloring (Wallis 1935) and the more recent The Art of Persuasion: Political Communication in Italy From 1945 to the 1900s (Cheles and Sponza 2001). Additional studies conducted in the last decade have further investigated the projection of politicians’ image (or ‘self’), particularly through the Internet. They include, among a few others (Mahler and Regan 2005; Cohen 2007), Girish Gulati’s (2004) study of self-image presentation (particularly expressed through pictures and symbols) by US Senators and House members on their web homepages; James Stanyer’s (2008) analysis and comparison of the identity that US members of Congress and British MPs project to their respective constituents through their websites, particularly by emphasizing (through text) specific qualities and personality traits.

... and extreme claims

This gap in political communication research about image is both surprising and troubling considering the moralistic tones that underlie most assessments of the effects that the growing importance of visual aspects of political communication are having on politics overall. Strong, if not extreme, claims are made about the negative effects of this phenomenon leading to a ‘crisis’, ‘decay’ or ‘degeneration’ of politics. As the previous literature review has shown, given that systematic analysis of the role of image is scarce, these claims are not based on solid evidence. The accounts of political communication in ‘post-modern Western societies’, in fact, are described by de Beus (2011: 19) as ‘often moralizing and adversarial’; Mazzoleni and Schultz (1999: 248) define the stances of those who ‘see the media as one of the most crucial factors in the crisis of politics’ as ‘apocalyptic’; Coleman and Blumler (2009), who examine the political impact of the Internet, talk about an ‘inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication’; Strömbäck (2008: 229) notices that

The present situation when politics is mediated and mediatized [in the literature] is implicitly or explicitly compared to some kind of golden age – the exact timing of which is conspicuously absent in most accounts – when politics was more true to its ideals, when people were more civic minded, or when the media facilitated, rather than undermined, the way political communication and democracy work.

The characteristics of the transformed politics revolving around televised (or online) images – what Bernard Manin (1997) refers to as ‘audience democracy’ – are on the one hand the public’s passivity, ignorance and disinterest in politics; on the other hand, the artificial – not to say fake – nature of the politicians’ media personas. The former aspect is embodied by the belief that ‘the initiative of the terms of electoral choice belongs to the politician and not to the electorate’ (ibid.: 223, emphasis in original). In the words of Mancini (2011: 14), who applies Manin’s framework to explain the Berlusconi case in Italy, ‘voters are mere spectators of that which is put on the stage by those politicians who are the initiators and the central, dominant figures’. The spectators of audience democracy are ‘consumers’ of politics rather than engaged participants. As Janelle Ward (2011: 167) points out: ‘Citizens are usually juxtaposed with consumers: the former are seen as being more conscious and active and the latter politically disinterested and passive’. As a further proof of how widespread this interpretation is, Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler (2009: 46), on the same point, write that ‘in their approach to politics, citizens have become more like consumers (instrumental, oriented to immediate gratifications and potentially fickle) than believers’.

Mancini (2011: 30) adds to this the notion that the ‘big narratives’, the ‘ideologies’ of the past have been replaced by ‘lifestyle politics’ – ‘the overlap between everyday life and politics’ in which politics is about personal trust in political candidates rather than the ‘obscure, difficult, ambiguous topics – the stuff of which real politics is made and which governments must resolve’. One cannot escape the feeling that the public is not only portrayed in an unflattering manner but assumed to be an outright mass of gullible individuals who are at the receiving end of Machiavellian political manipulations. In Murray Edelman’s (1988, in Mancini 2011: 17) words:

The public is mainly a black hole into which the political efforts of politicians, advocates of causes, the media, and the schools disappear without a trace. Its apathy, indifference, quiescence and resistance to the consciousness industry is especially impressive in an age of widespread literacy and virtually universal access to the media.

Political actors, conversely, are seen as ‘pious, trained and organized liars’ (de Beus 2011: 32). As Scammell (1996: 186) points out, political marketing has ‘a bad name: “marketing” is perceived as a commercial intrusion, perhaps inevitable but scarcely uplifting. In the common currency of media, even academic debate, political marketing is the antithesis of ideological commitment and principle; at best a triumph of pragmatism over passion, at worst a danger to democracy’ (ibid.). The amount of resources and extent of effort in delivering messages to the public and keeping ratings up ‘seems only to fuel public mistrust in the authority and honesty of political leaders’ (Brants and Voltmer 2011a: 1). The assumption is that the ‘mediated reality’ politicians conjure up is different from the ‘objective reality’ (Strömbäck 2008: 239). That is also why the ‘staged’ self (or media persona) of the politician is believed to hide a ‘real’ self. Worse, the idea is that the image of the politician is ‘pure esteriority’ (Ceccarelli in Belpoliti 2009: back cover).

In this context the study presented here aims to be a first step towards addressing such a gap in political communication research by developing a systematic app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Image in Political Communication: Obscure Areas and Troubling Assumptions
• 2  Methodology
• 3  A New Framework for Analysis
• 4  Findings
• 5  A Different Understanding of the Mediatization of Politics
• 6  Conclusions
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index