Passionate Hiking Fan or Loving Parent? How Personalized Self-Presentation in the Media Affects the Perception of Female and Male Politicians

Authors

  • Nora Denner Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
  • Svenja Schäfer University of Vienna
  • Christian Schemer Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Keywords:

personalization, privatization, political communication, gender roles, experimental research

Abstract

Even though studies have intensively investigated personalization in the media, little is known about the effects of personal information on the perception of politicians (privatization). Especially if politicians share information about their private life, gender might play an important role. To test this assumption, we conducted two experiments (2 × 3 between-subjects design, Nstudy1 = 472; Nstudy2 = 739) varying gender of a politician (male/female) and the disclosure of personal information (no information/hobby/family) in a fictitious news interview. Results show that gender can play a crucial role depending on the form of privatization. While we see no significant changes in the politician’s perception when they are mentioning their hobby, we find that, for a male politician, sharing information about family life in a traditional manner leads to a decline in trust and reduces perceptions of warmth. For a female politician, the different kinds of self-presentation do not affect image perception and voting outcomes.

Author Biographies

Nora Denner, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Nora Denner is a research associate at the Department of Communication, Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany. She is currently working on her dissertation thesis looking at the personalization of corporate communication and corporate news coverage. Her research interests include personalization, trust in news media and corporations as well as media effects.

Svenja Schäfer, University of Vienna

Svenja Schäfer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Austria. In her dissertation, she investigated effects of online news media on actual and perceived knowledge. Her research interests include the selection and effects of different kinds of online news including news in social media and user comments. 

Christian Schemer, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Christian Schemer is Professor for Communication at the Department of Communication, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on media representations of social groups and the effects of media portrayals of social groups on intergroup attitudes.

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Published

2022-03-14

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Section

Articles