The Personalization of Politics in the Media Coverage: a Comparison of Election Campaigns in Spain and Germany

Personalization is a phenomenon increasingly spread out in the area of political communication. Even if it is not a new feature, mass media irruption, particularly television, and the mediatisation of politics have brought its growth on. Thus, the interest from scholars towards personalization has been shown in numerous studies, especially in the last decade. The aim of this work is to assess to what extent and to what degree the personalization can be considered as a current feature in the election press coverage of countries with similar political systems, but with different media systems. There, personalization is understood as a practice of the journalists characterized by focusing the attention of the media coverage on politicians, as well as by the greater emphasis on their personal characteristics. The method used is content analysis of the news covering the electoral campaigns of 2009 and 2011 in Germany and Spain respectively, from the main newspapers of each country. As a comparative study, this allows getting a better understanding of personalization phenomenon from a international perspective.