The face of the party? Leadership personalisation in British campaigns

Milazzo, Caitlin; Hammond, Jesse

Abstract

The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalisation of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalised messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3,300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalisation of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light.

Citation

Milazzo, C., & Hammond, J. (2018). The face of the party? Leadership personalisation in British campaigns. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 28(3), 263-282. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1394309

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 9, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Nov 11, 2017
• Publication Date: 2018
• Deposit Date: Nov 6, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: May 12, 2019
• Journal: Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
• Print ISSN: 1745-7289
• Electronic ISSN: 1745-7297
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 263-282
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1394309
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/894381
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17457289.2017.1394309
• Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties on 11 November 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17457289.2017.1394309