Politicians, Personal Image and the Construction of Political Identity: A Comparative Study of the...

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0001

Politicians, Personal Image and the Construction of Political Identity

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0001

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0001

Politicians, Personal Image and the Construction of Political Identity: A Comparative Study of the UK and ItalyCristina ArchettiUniversity of Salford, UK

© Cristina Archetti 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2014 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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www.palgrave.com/pivot

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014

ISBN 6968-0 ISBN (eBook)DOI

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0001

To all guerrilla researchers who follow their questions wherever they might lead, no matter what.

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0001

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction

Image in Political Communication: Obscure Areas and Troubling Assumptions

Methodology

A New Framework for Analysis

Findings

A Different Understanding of the Mediatization of Politics

Conclusions

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

viiDOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0002

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robin Brown (as always), the anonymous reviewer, and Alexa Robertson for the helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. I am also indebted to Anna Catalani, with whom I have discussed the initial ideas of this project.

I am deeply grateful to all interviewees for having been so enthusiastically helpful and so generous with their time despite their hectic schedules.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0003

Introduction

Abstract: In an image-obsessed media age, the notion that the way a politician “looks” is important might appear almost obvious. Yet, the amount of anecdotal evidence about the relevance of personal image and self-presentation in politics is not matched by a comparable volume of rigorous academic research. This section outlines the rationale for the study presented in this book and the contributions it makes to our understanding of political communication in the twenty-first century.

Keywords: appearance; guerrilla research; mediatization of politics; presentation; role of image in politics

Archetti, Cristina, Politicians, Personal Image and the Construction of Political Identity: A Comparative Study of the UK and Italy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137353429.0003.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0003

Politicians, Personal Image and Construction of Identity

This book is about the role of personal image and self-presentation in politics. The notion that the way one “looks” when engaging in political activity is important appears almost obvious. Beyond the cult of leaders’ portraits and representations, and the massive role of propaganda art, logos, and posters in the elaborate public choreographies of totalitarian regimes (Heller 2008), the cultivation of appearances has always been essential to the exercise of political power. One can think, for example, of the political communication value of artworks like the Jacques-Louis David’s flattering paintings of Napoleon displayed at the Louvre in Paris,1 or the meticulous planning of official ceremonies, diplomatic meetings, and dinners among heads of state (Stelzer 2011).

Yet, systematically managing a politician’s image seems to have acquired an even greater role in the last few decades as part of the alleged ‘mediatization’ of politics. It is a well-known fact that image consultancy agencies are recruited to provide advice during political campaigning – what on the eastern side of the Atlantic is often referred to as the ‘Americanization’ of politics (Negrine and Papathanassopoulos 1996; Baines, Scheucher and Plasser 2001; Yannas 2002).2 According to the Center for Responsive Politics (2012) $322,801,280 was spent in the 2012 US presidential election campaign on media consultants alone – 31 per cent of the overall expenditure and by far the highest cost on the campaign budget.3

The amount of anecdotal evidence about the relevance of image and self-presentation in politics, however, is not matched by a comparable volume of rigorous academic research. The current literature is charac-terized by two main strands of research. The first, rooted in sociology, fashion studies, and material culture studies, is constituted by analyses of dressing codes, their social significance, and the way they have been constructed and modified over time (Barnard 2002; Barthes 1990). These studies do include observations about the political and social significance of such dressing codes (Crane 2000; Keenan 2001)4 and, occasionally, the styles of dress worn by individual politicians. Examples of the latter range from a communication analysis of the role of Gandhi’s dressing style in his ‘Swadeshi revolution’ (Gonsalves 2010) to the discussion of the symbolic role of former British Prime Minister Thatcher’s handbag on Radio 4’s programme ‘Woman’s Hour’.5 Yet the focus on the politi-cal significance and effect of dressing codes is occasional. The sources that specifically deal with women in politics (Betts 2011; Young 2011)6 contain informative and interesting details about the backstage crafting

Introduction

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of First Ladies’ and female politicians’ looks, particularly insights as to the communicative effects that the choice of specific clothing items, colours, accessories, or hairdos were intended to achieve. For instance, Young (2011) explains how former prime minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko’s famous braided ‘wheel’ and ‘demure yet commanding’ outfits served her political purposes. The author reports the words of the social psychologist believed to have served as Tymoshenko’s image consultant: ‘It was necessary to work out and implement an image that would block out the image formed by ... propagandists [for president Leonid Kuchma]: one of wealth, of envy, hatred ... I created an image of a modest village teacher ... a Ukranian archetype’ (Oleh Pokalchuk, in Young 2011: 112–113). These details are essential to a thorough examina-tion of the role of image in politics. Such accounts, however, tend to read more like highbrow versions of a fashion magazine than systematic analyses.

The second, more substantial, strand of research is the one on which this book is going to concentrate most. It is constituted by political communication literature. Most analysis there addresses the way com-munication technologies are used by political actors to convey messages to the media and the public. They particularly focus on how politicians “package” politics, interacting with journalists in the attempt to “manage” the media agenda (Franklin 2004) and how they campaign about specific issues with what effects. The visual aspects of political communication are marginal and mostly approached through the lenses of political mar-keting (Butler and Collins 1994; O’Cass 1996; De Landtsheer, de Vries and Vertessen 2008; Smith 2009), popular culture (van Zoonen 2005; Mazzoleni and Sfardini 2009; Van Zoonen, Coleman and Kuik 2011), and analyses of the effects of the increasing symbiosis between politics and media.

In relation to the last point, most studies are couched within the terms of the ‘mediatization’ (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Strömbäck 2008) and ‘professionalization’ (Mancini 1999) of politics. These analyses are often associated to the idea that the media are deeply involved in – when they are not responsible for (see, for instance, Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999: 247–249) – a process of decay in which democratic politics becomes dominated by the profit logic of the market. These analyses often betray a moralistic stance that sees “image” as a synonym for “appearance” and, at the same time, as the antithesis of “substance”. Although there are dif-ferent approaches, as will be explained in more detail later, they appear

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to converge around the common assumption that image, together with spin and media management, is a constructed veneer that hides the ‘real’ substance of political issues and, with it, the true identity of a politician from the eyes of an increasingly disinterested and often gullible public – image manipulation is often credited for the electoral successes of the likes of Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder (Mancini 1999: 236–237).

Such negative assessments have often led to the publicly dismissive treatment of politicians’ “obsession” with presentation. British Labour candidate Barbara Follett,7 for instance, famously advised her party’s female colleagues on how to be more presentable as part of the New Labour re-styling in the 1990s. This practice has been widely mocked as ‘folletting’ (Turner 2001). We can think more recently about the ironic tones underlying the coverage of Gordon Brown’s make-up routine (Summers 2009), David Cameron’s summer wardrobe (Letts 2011; Fox and Chilvers 2011), Berlusconi’s and (allegedly) Vladimir Putin’s plastic surgery (Elder 2011), or the attention drawn by Rick Santorum’s vest (which still has its own Facebook page) during the 2012 US presidential campaign (Gross 2012).8

As an example of the outright contempt to which the management of presentation by leading figures of political parties is sometimes subjected by both academics and journalists, one can further look at the way the association between New Labour and the corporate image consultancy ‘Colour Me Beautiful’ is treated in the following excerpt. Charlotte Adcock (2010: 145) writes about the way in which the ‘Representations of New Labour [women] politicians [in newspaper coverage] ... ranged from feminised images of an “on-message”, “colour-me-beautiful set” of clones with “manicured nails and lobotomised opinions” to their depic-tion as political innocents “doing battle for Tony Blair’s babes’ army” ’.

Overall, although visual aspects are understood to play a key role in the mediatization of politics, there is a lack of systematic analysis of the role of political representatives’ personal image. This book aims at filling such a gap by presenting a multidisciplinary and international comparative investigation of the role of politicians’ self-presentation in the domains that are most neglected by current political communication literature: local and supranational politics, as well as the daily routines of politicians, rather than the usual focus on national-level politics, party leaders in particular, at high times of electoral campaigning. On the basis of 51 interviews, this study compares the role of personal image in the

Introduction

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everyday political practices of both British and Italian local politicians and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), respectively based in West Yorkshire and the Lombardy region of Italy.

The analysis combines a critique of the current way in which the role of image in politics is conceptualized with the presentation of a new theoretical framework that firmly places the visual aspects of political communication within the broader construction of political identity in contemporary societies. This framework brings together relational sociology, actor-network theory (ANT) and symbolic interactionism (particular reference will be made to Erving Goffman’s approach in The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life).

Ultimately the book makes four contributions: it is a first step to map-ping the mechanisms through which identity and political meaning are collectively constructed in contemporary politics; second, it both rejects the notion of ‘mediatization’ and suggests a radically different alterna-tive for understanding the impact of an image-obsessed media age on politics; third, it demonstrates that current studies really apply to the proverbial tip of the political iceberg, thereby showing the analytical benefits of bringing the “everyday” and the “individual” back into the study of political communication; lastly, it shows that the moralistic stand about the supposed deleterious effect of appearance on democratic politics (with the relative dismissal of politicians as liars and the public as passive and ignorant consumers of glossy images) reflects more the nar-rowness of academic enquiry – a handful of party leaders with national and international media visibility – and the legacy of outdated models of politics-media relationships – linear politicians-media-public links – than the much vaster, variegated, and relational reality of contemporary politics.

This study additionally constitutes an example of what I call “guerrilla research”. Guerrilla research is based on the notion that, as social scien-tists, we live surrounded by data and can conduct research practically everywhere. Even at times of economic crisis, when receiving research funding is increasingly difficult, it is possible to strike a balance between conceptual rigour and practicality. This book wants to be a tangible published demonstration – thereby hopefully also an inspiration, espe-cially for those young scholars whose enthusiasm for research is being dampened by writing research bids that tend to get rejected – that substantial amounts of funding are not essential to producing innovative scholarship.9 While wide-scoped research projects, perhaps involving

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international partners and millions-of-pounds resources, certainly have an important role in academic research, extremely valuable data and findings, especially on under-researched areas of investigation, can still be gathered through self-contained, zero-budget studies. The fieldwork of these small-scale, “quick and dirty” research projects, different from ‘The Big Research’, as Ross Unger and Todd Zaki Warfel (2011) call it, can be conducted on one’s own within weeks (perhaps days) rather than years. The 51 interviews conducted as part of this study were, for instance, arranged in the author’s own research time via email and conducted at no cost over Skype or (at still extremely low price) landline phone – all within five weeks.

For the purpose of thoroughly demonstrating the utility of the relational theoretical framework presented here, the “old” and the “new” explanations of the role of self-presentation in politics – the former rooted in the ‘mediatization’ literature, the latter based on the suggested model – are applied to the case study of the UK and Italy. Across the chapters, these two approaches gradually build up to a picture in which the explanations they offer of self-presentation in the political process in the two countries under study are juxtaposed. My point, by applying the two different approaches to the same set of data, is to show the reader that the new relational framework enables the researcher to ‘see more’, understand in greater depth, and ultimately explain the variation in the role of politicians’ personal image across national, political, and media contexts more effectively than does the ‘mediatization’ perspective.

The arguments unfold through six chapters. Chapter 1 places the concern with the role of personal image and self-presentation into the context of political communication literature, particularly concentrating on the gaps and problematic assumptions of current research. Chapter 2 outlines the research design of the study and the rationale for the choice of interviews as a method. This section also outlines the hypotheses the ‘mediatization’ approach to self-presentation in politics would sup-port in relation to the cases of Italy and the UK. Chapter 3 illustrates the new explanatory framework for understanding the role of image in contemporary politics, particularly establishing the basics of relational sociology, ANT, symbolic interactionism and how the insights that each approach provides are both combined in and applied to the study. Chapter 4 illustrates the findings of the empirical investigation, drawing on the many voices of the politicians who have been interviewed and

Introduction

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emphasizing the extreme nuance in the way personal image fits within everyday political routines in the two countries. As will be explained, the data patterns defy the expectations (hypotheses) of the ‘mediatiza-tion’ approach to self-presentation in politics and can be more effectively explained by focusing on the way in which politicians, at the local, national and supranational levels, construct their identities through both direct and mediated (via communication technologies and/or media coverage) relationships. The point of this chapter is to demonstrate that it is not that the ‘mediatization’ approach is wrong, but that it is insuf-ficient to cover the diversity and variation that characterizes the world of politics beyond the narrow focus on party leaders at election times. Chapter 5 further discusses the evidence by spelling out the limitations of current research and the analytical benefits of a relational conceptu-alization of personal image in political communication. Chapter 6 briefly concludes the analysis by pointing out that the way in which the role of self-presentation in politics is explained by current studies only applies to the proverbial tip of the political iceberg. This is due not only to the paucity of comparative research but also to the lack of an appropriate ontological scaffolding to make sense of it.

Notes

Napoleon was proclaimed emperor in May 1804. He commissioned Jacques-Louis David to paint the coronation to glorify the event and convey its political and symbolic meaning. As in the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon was consecrated emperor by a pope. Napoleon, however, crowned himself facing the congregation rather than the altar to mark his independence from the Church. As Malika Bouabdellah Dorbani (n.d.) observes, ‘Although David’s initial sketch represented the Emperor in the act of crowning himself, the final painting shows him crowning the Empress – a gesture that presents a nobler, less authoritarian image, described by Napoleon himself as that of a “French knight”’.While in this book ‘mediatization’ refers to the “Americanization” and “sensationalization” of politics, mainly through marketing, spin and media management, it is true that the term can be used more broadly to refer to the blurring of the boundary between the political and media dimensions (see, for instance, Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010, especially chapter 2).The record total cost of the election campaign was $1,052,500,697. After ‘political consultants’, the second item in terms of scope of expenditure

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is ‘broadcast media’ at $157,319,619. The cost of media consultants ($322,801,280) exceeded the actual expenditure on ‘broadcast media’, ‘Internet media’, ‘miscellaneous media’ and ‘print media’ combined ($260,978,352). This expenditure breakdown was last accessed and saved in the author’s records in February 2013. At the time of writing (August 2013), however, the category ‘political consultants’ appears to have been removed and buried under ‘unspecified media buys’.For a guide about the significance of dress in business, see Comfort (2006). Jenny Murray (presenter), ‘The Handbag: A Symbol of Female Power and Style?’, Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, 5 May 2011, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b010t6lk.As examples of literature about specific women politicians, Scammell (1996) and Conway (2012) write about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Winfield (1997) about Hillary Clinton as First Lady.http://www.barbara-follett.org.uk/biography/index.html. http://www.facebook.com/FearRicksVest. Donald Braben (2004; 2011) develops a range of arguments for pioneering research that does not need to be supported by high budgets. The idea of guerrilla research was further inspired by a presentation by Ross Unger (2011) about ‘Guerrilla Research Methods’ in the field of computer user experience (‘UX’). I am here applying the principles of zero-cost, short-term research conducted through whatever means are at the investigator’s disposal to produce valuable knowledge that was not available before. The bottom line, as Unger and Todd Zaki Warfel pragmatically put it, is that ‘after all, some good research is better than none’.

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1Image 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


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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 technolo-gies, 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 radi-cally 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.:

Image in Political Communication

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251). Such adaptation affects the ‘outlook’ of political actors, the com-munication 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 commu-nication 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, empha-size 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 life-styles 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 consumer-ism; ‘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 perform-ance; ‘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 mov-ing 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 col-lective 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 techni-cal skills, especially media and public relations experts, consultants and

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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 devel-opment, especially in communications, has led to a process of ‘homog-enisation 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 poten-tial 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 contribu-tions in Kees Brants and Katrin Voltmer 2011b, for instance), the weak-ening 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 par-ties has only expanded the political function of the mass media’. In turn, this trend leads to a ‘personalization’ of politics, where campaigning is


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candidate-centred (Manin 1997 219–221). Brought to the extreme, this could lead to what Mazzoleni (1995: 315) calls a ‘videocracy’ or ‘democ-racy 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 politi-cal 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 politi-cal ‘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 deal-ing with the media, especially in getting their ‘message’ across and con-trolling the ‘story’ – what is normally called ‘spin’ (Grattan 1998; Kurtz 1998; Gaber 2000; Bennett and Entman 2001; Jones 2002; Campbell

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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 (espe-cially 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 ave-nues 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 congress-man’s allocation of his personal resources and those of his office ... the congressman’s presentation of self to others ... the congressman’s explana-tion 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


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others (Mahler and Regan 2005; Cohen 2007), Girish Gulati’s (2004) study of self-image presentation (particularly expressed through pic-tures 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 emphasiz-ing (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 phe-nomenon 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 impoverish-ment 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

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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 wide-spread 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 politi-cians, advocates of causes, the media, and the schools disappear without a trace. Its apathy, indifference, quiescence and resistance to the conscious-ness 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


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authority and honesty of political leaders’ (Brants and Voltmer 2011a: 1). The assumption is that the ‘mediated reality’ politicians conjure up is dif-ferent 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 approach to the role of self-presentation in contemporary politics. In doing so it takes a broader approach than existing studies, both ontologically and methodologically. For a start this study overcomes the tendency of the ‘mediatization’ literature to focus on structural fac-tors by adopting a social ontology that also includes equal attention to individual agency (individual politicians in this case). Methodologically the study thus applies a deeper micro-level approach to the examination of the political process. More specifically it engages with the following questions: What is the role of self-presentation, not only in com-municating a ‘message’ to a ‘target audience’ but also in constructing a politician’s identity? Rather than guessing through extrapolations from structural factors and the characteristics of a media environment, what is the assessment of the role of self-presentation by the political actors themselves? How important is personal image to politicians, both the one they project in personal face-to-face interaction and the one they convey through the media (not only the Internet but also social media and television, as well as press coverage)? How much effort do elected representatives put into presenting themselves to others? And what is the role of self-presentation in everyday politics, as opposed to during election times, for politicians who might be located at different degrees of distance (Members of the European Parliament [MEPs] rather than local councillors, for example) and visibility (that is, representatives who might not be as highly visible as party leaders) from their fellow citizens? Finally, what shapes the relevance of self-presentation in different politi-cal cultures, party-, media- and electoral systems?

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2Methodology

Abstract: This chapter presents the research design of the study and the rationale for the choice of interviews as a method. This section also outlines the hypotheses the ‘mediatization’ approach to self-presentation in politics would support in relation to the cases of Italy and the UK.

Keywords: communication technology; constituency; electoral system; hypotheses; interviews; media system; mediatization of politics; methodology; party system; political culture; research design; variables


Methodology

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Method and research design

As previously mentioned, this study drew inspiration from Richard Fenno’s Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (1978). Although it was not possible to fully replicate his participant observation of political representatives due to the limited resources at the researcher’s disposal, personal phone interviews were used as a means to get as close as possible to the political actors’ perspectives within the environment in which they operate most of the time and feel most comfortable in: their offices and homes. Physically meeting and following the politicians in their activities would have been an extremely rich source of data. An advantage offered by telephone interviews, however, was the possibility to include more participants – 51 against Fenno’s 18, across different countries and politi-cal roles. While aware of what others researchers would have ‘looked for’ in conducting the interviews, I purposely kept an open mind about the problem at hand, which was reflected in the semi-structured format of the questionnaire (see Appendix). Questions were slightly modified, and new ones were added as the conversations went on, depending on the time availability of the interviewees, as well as their reactions to previous questions and prompts. Interviewees were also never restrained from developing their answers in any direction they wanted to take them. The purpose was to get as close as possible to the worldview of the political actors themselves. As Fenno (1978: 250) describes the enterprise of this kind of qualitative research: ‘an open-minded exposure to events [ideas in the case of the phone interviews] in the milieu and to the perspectives of those with whom they [researchers] interact will produce ideas that might never have occurred them otherwise’. The interview data was com-plemented by the observation of politicians’ online presence (websites, blogs, Facebook accounts, and Twitter feeds), if available, particularly image galleries.

The study involved 51 interviews with British and Italian politicians1. They were conducted in February–March 2012, and lasted between 10 and 45 minutes, with an average of about 20 minutes. In order to exam-ine a different dimension of politics than the one tackled by current research – party leaders on the national political scene – the interviews included local politicians, Members of Parliament (MPs), and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs).2

The British local politicians were councillors3 from Leeds (West Yorkshire), the second-largest district in the UK, with almost

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800,000 inhabitants.4 The Italian politicians included the consiglieri comunali (town councillors) of the comune (town) of Brescia and Iseo within the region of Lombardy. Brescia is a town of about 1,250,000, while Iseo has a population of around 9,000.5 I choose both of them to examine the function and extent, within the professional life of political representatives, of face-to-face social relationships against mediated ones.

‘Mediatization’-based variables and hypotheses

The comparative research design of the study enables to control for a range of variables that, on the basis of the existing literature, are expected to affect the role of personal image in politics. I will now discuss five of them and outline, in turn, the expectations – which I am going to formulate as loose hypotheses – they enable the researcher to make in relation to the case studies at hand. This serves the purpose of presenting to the reader the ‘old’ understanding of the role of self-presentation in politics. The illustration of the actual findings in Chapter 4 will later, by contrast, demonstrate the analytical merits of the new proposed rela-tional approach.

Party system. The ‘personalization’ of politics has been normally associ-ated with two-party systems rather than multiparty ones (see van Biezen and Hopkin 2005, for instance).6 The typical case of two-party system that has strongly encouraged a polarization and personalization of politics is the US. The UK has only recently, with the rise of the Liberal Democrats (part of the government coalition since 2010), distanced itself from the traditional Labour/Conservative horserace. In comparing the online self-presentation of political representatives in the US and the UK, James Stanyer (2008) finds that American House members tend to emphasize personal qualities to a greater extent than do their British counterparts. UK politicians, instead, tend to downplay their individuality in favour of a stronger party loyalty. The fact that Britain has far fewer parties than Italy to choose from and that they tend to converge towards the politi-cal centre, however, would lead to expect a greater role of a candidate’s image as a factor affecting voting preferences in Britain than Italy.7 In Italy, where the political spectrum ranges from the far right to the far left through all the orientations in between, a voter would be expected to rather be casting a ballot for the party that best represents his/her

Methodology

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interests and values. This effect is hypothesized to materialize also in consideration of the electoral system.

Electoral system. The first-past-the-post electoral system (the candidate who gets the most votes wins) is expected to support a greater role for politicians’ self-presentation than a proportional system (where even parties that do not get the most votes can still get their representatives elected). Both local and national elections are conducted in Britain according to the first-past-the-post system. General elections are held every five years (last election in 2010). At the local level between one and three councillors represent each ward on the local council. In Leeds the three councillors who get the most votes in each of 33 wards are elected. One-third of the 99 overall councillors are elected every year, followed by a year without elections (each councillor normally serves for four years).

Italy has traditionally had a proportional system. This was changed in 2005 with the Calderoli Law (Legge Calderoli). Now at least 340 seats (majority) within the Parliament (lower chamber) are allocated to the coalition that gains the relative majority of the votes at the national general elections. The remaining seats are allocated according to the proportional system. The electoral lists for each party are ‘closed’. This means that each party decides which candidates will sit in Parliament. The voter does not therefore express any preference (as would be the case of ‘open’ electoral lists), which leads to expect a lesser role for a political candidate’s personal image. General elections are normally held every five years. The last elections at the time of the interviews were held in April 2008.

At the local level the system is different. For comuni with less than 15,000 inhabitants, as in the case of Iseo, each mayoral candidate has an associated list of consiglieri comunali (maximum 16). The mayoral candi-date who gains the relative majority is elected and ‘carries’ at least 12 of the people on his/her list as consiglieri comunali in the new administra-tion. The remaining consiglieri comunali seats are attributed according to the proportional system. In comuni with more than 15,000 inhabitants, as in the case of Brescia, if no mayoral candidate achieves an absolute majority (50 + 1 vote), then the two candidates with the highest number of votes re-present themselves two weeks later (‘double turn’). Once a candidate achieves the absolute majority, then the same procedure as for smaller comuni applies for the distribution of the consiglieri comunali seats (between 40 and 60). In this system the preference of the voters is

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important not only in choosing the mayor but also in determining who, within the mayoral list, will actually sit on the Consiglio Comunale (town council). The last elezioni comunali (local elections) at the time of the interviews were held in Iseo in 2009 and in Brescia in 2008.

Elections to the European Parliament are held every five years (last held in 2009) according to the proportional system. Party lists are “open” in Italy (voter preference is important), but “closed” in the UK (each party decides whom to send to Strasbourg).

What I was particularly interested in investigating through the inter-views was the role of politicians’ personal image in shaping voters’ pref-erences, especially in the case of “open” lists. In this respect interviews were designed to find out the ways in which candidates achieved vis-ibility at election times – how would voters recognize them? why would voters express a preference for them, especially when they might never meet them in person (or see them on television or in the press for that matter)? – and how they established relationships with their constituents while in office. The expectation was that the media, both as organiza-tions within national media systems and communication technology platforms (Internet, social media, and so forth), would play a crucial role in this respect. Their relevance would be further mediated by the size of each representative’s constituency – where are the voters with whom a politician is attempting to communicate physically located and how accessible are they? – and each country’s political culture. I will return to size of constituency and political culture shortly.

Media system. Would partisanship of the press make any difference in politicians’ visibility to the public? As Robin Brown (2011) points out, there is a tight relationship between political communication, particu-larly spin and media management – the attempt by political actors to control news coverage – on the one hand, and the political and media systems on the other hand. In comparatively examining the political communication practices in the UK and the Netherlands, he writes that ‘the emergence of spin is not simply a matter of mediatization but of the structure of the political and media markets’ (ibid.: 64). In the case of the UK, the fact that two main parties are competing, essentially, for the same voters makes the ability of influencing people with low interest in politics decisive for electoral success. This also underscores the role of media management, the attempt at controlling the politi-cal message that reaches these voters. Media management, however, further makes sense because of the ‘objective’ nature of journalism in

Methodology

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Anglo-Saxon countries (ibid.: 62–63). This would not be the case if the media were partisan. In fact, as Brown writes, ‘a strongly partisan media would always provide favourable coverage to the party it supports and negative coverage to the party that it opposes, making news manage-ment unnecessary or pointless’ (ibid.: 63). To demonstrate this point he further examines the case of the Netherlands. This country’s society has for the large part of the twentieth century been divided along four parallel segments (Catholic, Protestant, socialist, liberal), or ‘pillars’, each of which has its own party, media and social organizations. In this system members of the public tend to vote for the party and read the media of their respective pillar. Each pillar, in other words, has its own ‘culture’. Electoral campaigning revolves around mobilizing core sup-porters through the pillar’s respective media and local organizations, rather than attempting to convince volatile centre voters (ibid.: 65–67). As Brown concludes:

the importance of news management in Britain arises from the coincidence of a competitive party system with a flexibly partisan media. The pillarized socio-political regime that existed in the Netherlands for a large part of the twentieth century provides an extreme counter-case of a political com-munications system that seems almost purposefully designed to limit the importance of news management. (Ibid.: 65)

According to Brown’s analysis, one would expect more attention towards media management – including concern about the way a politician’s image is projected – in the UK rather than in Italy. The rea-son is that Britain is closer to a biparty system and that Anglo-Saxon journalism aspires to objectivity, while Italy is a multiparty system and a country characterized by a commentary-oriented journalistic tradition (Archetti 2010: 17–19)8. This hypothesis, however, relies on the assumption that politicians are a constant source of interest for the media (national and mainstream). This might well be true in the case of party leaders and key governmental actors, but what happens at the local level? How do national politicians in Strasbourg or Brussels achieve any visibility when European politics – a notoriously unexcit-ing topic from the perspective of national media – might hardly receive any coverage at all?

Size of constituency Although the literature does not explicitly address this variable as a factor affecting the presentation of the political self, there are several references, especially in examining the image of

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politicians on the Internet, that online projections are ‘the initial point of contact between the representative and the constituent’ (Gulati 2004: 24). Personal image appears therefore crucial for politicians, in the context of a lack of geographical proximity, to introduce themselves to-, be known by-, even ‘exist’ in front of the eyes of their constituents. One could hypothesize that the greater the distance between voter and rep-resentative (the bigger the constituency), the more significant the role of projected personal image – this being expected to be most important for MEPs and national politicians than for local councillors. It could also be argued, on the other hand, that close physical proximity could lead to attention not so much for a virtual and mediated self-image but for per-sonal presentation. The latter would include, beyond dress (which could still matter in pictures available online), behaviour, way of addressing interlocutors and tone of voice.

To explore how physical distance affects, in practice, the way politi-cians present themselves both in the media (not only websites but also newspaper coverage or social media) and face-to-face, the partici-pants included in the study had different degrees of proximity to their voters, depending on the size of their respective constituency. Local councillors in Leeds normally represent between 10,000 and 15,000 constituents. The consiglieri comunali in Brescia serve a town of over a million people, while in Iseo they represent just over 9,000 citizens. In the case of the latter, beyond the Iseo centre, the population lives concentrated in four smaller villages, or ‘frazioni’: Clusane, Covelo, Cremignane and Pilzone. Each of them counts a few hundred people where almost literally everyone knows everyone else. Instead, the constituencies represented by the British and Italian MEPs are, respec-tively Yorkshire and the Humber (5.3 million people) (UK Treasury Department 2011), and ‘Italia Nord-Occidentale [North-West Italy]’ (comprising the regions of Valle D’Aosta, Liguria, Lombardia and Piemonte for a total population of 15,000,000 inhabitants). Additional questions on which the interviews focused were: What is the role of personal face-to-face interaction versus the ‘mediated’ contact? When contact is mediated, how is it mediated exactly – through media coverage (mainstream media? local media? international media?) or through other communication technologies (such as blogs, websites, or social media )?

Political culture. As Richard Wilson (2000: 247) points out, there are different approaches to political culture:

Methodology

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Assumptions emphasize different factors, such as how individuals and/or groups are socialized, how different individuals organize their thinking about rules and norms, how discourse affects the legitimacy of political institutions, how and why individuals orient their thinking and communi-cation in terms of salient myths, rituals, and symbols, and how moral crite-ria are apprehended and with what consequences for political behaviour.

William Reisinger (1995: 334), in this respect, talks about a ‘profusion of definitions’ concerning the concept. For Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1989: 12) ‘the term “political culture” ... refers to the specifically political orientation – attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system’. Elsewhere Verba (1965: 513) defines political culture as the embedding of political systems in sets of meanings, specifically in symbols, beliefs, and values9. Lucian Pye (1968 in Wilson 2000: 247) enlarges the definition to include ‘both the political ideals and the operating norms of a polity’. Since I am already looking at ‘norms of the system’ through the lenses of electoral laws, in this study I will be concentrating on political culture mostly as individual beliefs, values, and meanings.

In this perspective the Italian political culture is believed to have been revolutionized by Silvio Berlusconi and his media-centred campaigning (Mancini 2011). The role of image, especially televisual voyeurism, has permeated society and degenerated to such an extent that Marco Belpoliti (2009: 156) goes so far as to talk about a ‘pornocrazia [pornocracy]’ – this point especially underlined by Berlusconi’s appointment of some min-isters almost exclusively on the basis of their looks rather than political experience (Moss 2009; Squires 2009)10. Belpoliti (2009) also discusses at length a peculiar Italian phenomenon – the cult of the ‘leader’s body [il corpo del capo]’. Without slipping into stereotypes, Italian popular cul-ture, if not general lifestyle, tends to be more oriented to the cultivation of appearances, as an entire tradition going back to Niccolò Machiavelli can confirm. Self-presentation is thus expected to play a greater role in Italy than in the UK.

The interview questions, apart from briefly covering the background of each interviewee – particularly one’s motivation for getting into poli-tics – mainly focused on examining the politicians’ personal image – the way the interviewees dressed but also the way they presented themselves through their approach to audiences, meeting fellow citizens at the local supermarket, speaking publicly, interacting with journalists… – and their engagement (either face-to-face or mediated) with the respective

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constituents.11 The aim of the data gathering in the conversations with the politicians was not only to test the hypotheses that have been out-lined on the basis of the ‘mediatization’ approach. The study also wanted to explore the combined effects of the variables that have been discussed, the way they are exactly connected, as well as the role of possible extra factors in shaping the role of personal image in politics, which might have been so far neglected.

As Chapter 4 will show through the direct experiences of the inter-viewees, the ‘mediatization’ approach variables do apply to the case studies. However, the findings point out that party-, political-, media systems, size of constituency, and political culture, while relevant, are clearly insufficient in accounting for the range of nuance and variation in the way in which political actors present themselves across the national/local, political and media contexts under study. A more effective expla-nation, which also includes an ontology of the world that, beyond the macro aspects of political/media systems and geography, also accounts for politicians’ individuality (particularly identity) is provided by a relational account of the political process. I will outline this alternative approach, its constituent components and embedded view of the social world in detail in the next chapter.

Notes

Thirty-three interviewees were British, and eighteen were Italian. All excerpts from interviews with Italian politicians are the author’s translation.Of the 33 British politicians: 30 were local councillors in Leeds (22 men; 8 women); 2 were MEPs (1 man; 1 woman); 1 was an MP (man). Of the 18 Italian interviewees: 7 were consiglieri comunali (town councillors) in Iseo (2 women; 5 men); 7 were consiglieri comunali in Brescia (3 women; 4 men); 3 were MEPs (2 men, 1 woman); 1 was an MP (man).For more on the councillor’s role and responsibilities, see: http://www.leeds. gov.uk/council/Pages/Councillors-and-Committees.aspx.The 2010 population estimate is 798,800 (Leeds Council 2010). The West Yorkshire Urban Area (Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield) has a population of 1,499,465 (Office for National Statistics 2005).The exact figures are 1,256,025 inhabitants for Brescia and 9,205 for Iseo (Comuni Italiani, n.d.).See also Lars Nord and Jesper Strömbäck (2009) for a study of how professionalized campaigning, including political marketing, applies to

Methodology

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a multiparty system. As the scholars, whose study refers to the Swedish European parliamentary elections, conclude: ‘in multiparty systems, smaller parties can be successful without using political marketing intelligence’ (ibid.: 43).In Italy, at the time of the interviews, there were at least 17 different parties represented in the Lower Chamber (Camera dei Deputati) (Parlamento Italiano 2012).For more on the characteristics of journalism traditions in different media systems, including Italy and the UK, see Hallin and Mancini (2004).‘The political culture of a society consists of the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which define the situation in which political action takes place. It provides the subjective orientation to politics’ (Verba 1965: 513).This point was also made by several Italian interviewees. For an example of the interview questions, see Appendix.

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3A New Framework for Analysis

Abstract: This chapter suggests a new explanatory framework to understand the role of personal image and self-presentation in contemporary politics. It establishes the basics of relational sociology, actor-network theory and symbolic interactionism, explaining how the insights each approach provides are both combined in and applied to the study.

Keywords: actor-network theory; construction of meaning; identity; ontology; relational sociology; relationship; social network; symbolic interactionism; technology



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The study explains the role of personal image in politics through a new framework that combines relational sociology, actor-network theory (ANT) and symbolic interactionism. Within this framework self-presentation is an aspect of an individual’s identity, and this, in turn, is the outcome of the constellation of relationships in which this social actor is enmeshed. Communication is the enabler of the estab-lishment of relationships. They do not exist, however, only with actors with whom we directly interact (people whom we have physically met, for instance). Communication can be mediated and relationships be established also at a distance. Calhoun (1991), in this respect, argues that the proliferation of ‘indirect relationships’ and the production of ‘imagined communities’ are two features that fundamentally character-ize modernity. He distinguishes four kinds of relationships: 1) direct interpersonal relations (face-to-face); 2) imagined personal connections that can exist, for instance, with political representatives and television personalities, and also through tradition; 3) one-directional relation-ships that are only known to one of the parties: examples are surveillance and phone tapping, as well as census data (which reveals information about individual spending patterns, for instance, without the population even knowing); 4) ‘the world of systemic integration or coordination by impersonal ... steering media ... which gives the illusion of not involving human interaction’ exemplified by “capitalism” or “the market” (ibid.: 96–105). The first two kinds of relationships are particularly relevant to the framework presented here.1

Communication technologies, in this context, can extend our social reach and ability to establish direct relationships – constituents, for example, can contact their local councillors by sending them emails – but they can also contribute to indirect relationships. For instance, a constituent can develop an indirect relationship with a political repre-sentative she has got to know through interviews the representative has been giving on local television, through posts on a personal blog, or speeches available on a website.

This is, in a nutshell, an anticipation of the world ontology of this study resulting from the integration of the three approaches discussed in this chapter. For Colin Hay (2002: 113), a social ontology is ‘a general statement of the manner in which agents are believed to appropriate their context and the consequences of that appropriation for their devel-opment as agents and for that of the context itself ’. A social ontology not only works as a set of lenses that enable us to see what exists, what is

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relevant to our analysis – to put it alternatively, what counts as data – but also establishes the rules according to which anything in our social and political world happens – chains of causation.

It could be argued that relational sociology, ANT and symbolic inter-actionism are, after all, variants of the same world view and that there is no need either to include them all or to deal with them separately. Relational sociology presupposes, in fact, that all meaning is relationally constructed through networks of relationships. ANT and symbolic inter-actionism are based on the same assumption of the way the social world is constructed – ANT emphasizing more markedly the role of objects in establishing these relationships; symbolic interactionism leaning more towards the examination of the meaning being created through the same social interactions. This is, however, precisely why I believe there is merit in focusing on the specific contribution of each approach and why I am going to discuss them separately: examining the problem at hand – the role of self-presentation in contemporary politics – through each perspective is like changing the colour of imaginary analytical sun-glasses, each shade enabling us to perceive specific nuances (aspects of the problem) more vividly than others.

I will start from relational sociology, which provides the skeleton of the ontological scaffolding of the new framework by enabling us to con-centrate on the role of relationships and connections in forming the texture of the social universe. I will then move on to ANT, whose input consists in enabling the understanding of the role of technologies (communication platforms and media, in our case) in changing the identities of social actors (here, politicians), particularly by affecting the scope of the networks of which they are part. Symbolic interactionism, with its focus on the social construction of the visual aspects of self-presentation, additionally helps make sense of how a social actor’s identity affects his/her personal image. I will discuss the details of the components of each approach and illustrate how, combined, they contribute to explain the role of self-image in the con-struction of political identity. These points will be further and empirically demonstrated through the experiences of the interviewees in Chapter 4.

Relational sociology

An immediate way in which relational sociology is useful for the pur-poses of the present study is that it allows grounding a key aspect of


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politics – identity – in a conceptual framework than seamlessly spans the micro and macro dimensions. Relational sociology conceives the social universe as entirely made up of relationships that are constantly being negotiated. In this process communication is ‘central’ (White 2008: 3). The extent to which relationships are subject to incessant re-working is captured in a statement by the sociologist and father of relational sociol-ogy, Harrison White, who compares social reality to shapeless matter that never sets: ‘There is no tidy atom and no embracing world, only complex striations, long strings reptating as in a polymer goo’ (ibid.: 18). Identity, in this perspective, is constituted in and through social ties. All identities, in fact, are ‘produced and sustained within interacting relational net-works’ (Bearman and Stovel 2000: 74). The concept of identity is neither only related to human agents – people – nor restricted exclusively to the notions of the self and consciousness. Instead identity is ‘any entity to which observers can attribute meaning’ (ibid.: 2). Identities arise out of communication situations (White 2008: 21). As White puts it: they ‘trig-ger out of events’; they are ‘switches in surroundings’ (ibid.: 1): ‘A firm, a community, a crowd, oneself on the tennis court, encounters of strangers on a sidewalk – each may be identities’ (ibid.: 2). As such one cannot have just one identity, but rather each one of us has multiple identities. An individual might be a husband but also a politician, a governor in a local school and a member of a birdwatching association. These are identities triggered by different sets of relationships organized in over-lapping networks (which White calls ‘networks domains’ or ‘netdoms’). To illustrate the way in which individuals have multiple identities and just ‘switch’ from one identity to another when navigating across sets of relationships, White uses the analogy of an Internet forum (ibid.: 2–3). One can create an account on a discussion forum (about sociology, for instance) where his/her identity is established through engagement in the discussion with other subscribers. The fictional user can then log out from that account and participate in another discussion (on a football forum, for example). Although the user has logged out of the sociology forum, the postings are not deleted: ‘the activity has left a social trace consisting of the ties to other identities in the forum. But the interaction has just switched from one netdom to another’ (ibid.: 3).

A pattern of ties constitutes a network (White 2008: 20). Every social agent can be conceived of as a node that is ‘located at the intersection of several distinct, often heterogenous networks’ (Azarian 2005: 60). This defines the unique position of each social actor within the social

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universe. Such a position is defined not only by the content of the ties – which might be goods, information, capital, rumours – but also by expectations that other identities are imposing on the actor. As Reza Azarian (2005: 61), a scholar of White’s sociology, describes this: ‘Since each relationship brings along a bundle of particular expectations and obligations, this embeddedness means being simultaneously subjected to a number of specific constraining forces’. In terms of the focus of the investigation, these constraints relate to the expectations associated to elected representatives’ presentation (such as dressing codes) in par-ticular situations and attached to specific social roles and circumstances. As I will show in illustrating the findings of this study, it is true that politicians choose, for instance, the clothes they are going to wear and do so sometimes with the explicit intention of conveying specific mes-sages. This choice, however, is the result of a balancing act that includes consideration of the observers’ expected reaction, as well as anticipation of the audience’s ‘reading’ of a particular outfit.

Actor-network theory

In relational sociology communication is acknowledged to be the essence of social interaction. Within this approach all that matters is the constitu-tion and constant re-workings of relationships, and it makes no difference whether they are constituted face-to-face, over the phone, online, or even whether they are imagined. Yet the fact that communication is virtually – and indistinctly – everywhere can turn into a hurdle on a researcher’s way to making sense of mediated communication, particularly of the role of communication technologies in the political process. The analysis turns therefore to ANT, which more explicitly addresses the question of the nature of technology and its role in society. In this sense ANT is par-ticularly useful in explaining how technology, especially communication platforms like the Internet or social media in our case, changes the identity of social actors, or the politicians in our study. To understand this, I am going to explain first where technology fits in the social world.

The social nature of technology

ANT developed from the field of science and technology studies. It is particularly associated with the work of the anthropologist Bruno


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Latour. Together with Steve Woolgar, in the book Laboratory Life (1979), he examined the way in which scientific facts are not discovered, but constructed in a research setting. Through that investigation Latour started developing the radical notion – which he further expanded in later works – of a networked social reality in which there is no dis-tinction between the ‘technical’ and the ‘social’. This means that, in practice, society is made up of networks – a view entirely compatible with that of relational sociology. These networks, however, include not only humans but also nonhumans: objects, technologies, ideas.

Latour developed this approach to overcome the ‘methodological individualism’ that, despite its roots stretching back to Aristotle and medieval philosophy, is still at the core of contemporary sociological explanations of reality (Emirbayer 1997: 283–284). In this respect, John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1949, in Emirbayer 1997: 284), although writing over 60 years ago, still capture the present-day tendency to see individuals as the ultimate source of social action:

All the spooks, fairies, essences, and entities that once [during the Middle Ages] had inhabited portions of matter now [take] flight to new homes, mostly in or at the human body ... The ‘mind’ as ‘actor’, still in use in present day psychologies and sociologies, is the old self-acting ‘soul’ with its immortality stripped off.

The puzzling result for Latour is that, albeit sociology developed mostly after the Industrial Revolution, in an era of profound technical advances, the role of objects in our society is largely ignored. As he lyrically phrases it, they ‘remain asleep like servants of some enchanted castle’ (Latour 2005: 73). In reality, as another influential voice within the ANT camp – John Law – points out, objects like machines are an integral part of our very identity:

we are all heterogeneous networks, the products of confused overlaps. Did you really find your way through last week without machines? Of course not! You are part machine. And if you pretend otherwise, then this is presumably because you (like me) prefer to think otherwise. For in polite company ... it is not generally considered to be a good thing to allow oneself to be ‘dehumanised’. (Law 1991b: 17)

As Law (1991b: 16) continues: ‘Structures do not simply reside in the actions of people, or in memory traces. They exist in a network of het-erogeneous material arrangements’. In fact, as Latour (1991: 110) points out:

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we are never faced with objects or social relations, we are faced with chains which are association of human (H) and non-humans (NH). No one has ever seen a social relation by itself ... nor a technical relation ... . Instead we are always faced by chains which look like this H-NH-H-NH-NH-NH-H-H-H-H-HN.

Objects – technologies and, among them, communication technolo-gies – in this perspective, do not just enable the establishing of networks, but they change the actors themselves. Technologies are not just tools or intermediaries, but ‘mediators’ (Latour 2005: 128). In fact ANT makes objects ‘participants’ in social action by overcoming the very definition of actors and agencies most adopted in sociology:

If action is limited a priori to what ‘intentional’, ‘meaningful’ humans do, it is hard to see how a hammer, a basket, a door closer, a cat, a rug, a mug, a list, or a tag could act. They might exist in the domain of ‘material’ ‘causal’ relations, but not in the ‘reflexive’ ‘symbolic’ domain of social relations. (Ibid.: 71)

To ‘break away from the influence of what could be called “figurative sociology” [the tendency to attribute “faces” to social action], ANT uses the technical word actant’ (ibid.: 54).

Actants have agency, which means that they ‘make a difference’: ‘hit-ting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling water with and without a kettle, fetching provisions with or without a basket’ (ibid.: 71) do make a difference, which makes the hammer, kettle and basket participants in the course of action. The same could be said for a website in the case of an MP or a Facebook page or newsletter for a local councillor.

This, however, does not mean that an object determines the action. The object participates in the action through what Latour (1999: 178–180) calls ‘interference’ and ‘composition’ (ibid.: 180–183). In the case of interfer-ence, a technology can change an actor’s ‘programme of action’, which can be thought of as the attempt to achieve a certain goal. A person hold-ing a gun is not the same as a person not holding a gun, as a politician who can directly communicate with a wide audience through a mailing list of selected contacts, or a website is not the same as a politician who cannot rely on these means (or chooses not to do so). The man with a gun, as the politician with a mailing list or a website, is a new ‘composite actor’. This does not necessarily mean that the man with the gun will use it, but while an initial goal might have been just to cause injury, the fact that a gun is in the hand of the actor can lead to a different goal – killing.


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In a similar way the politician with the mailing list or the website will not necessarily be able to communicate more effectively (or be a “better” or “more effective” politician for that matter), but the technology changes his/her identity in the sense that it modifies the range of behaviours he/she can engage in, the kind of messages that he/she can send – it offers a range of opportunities as much as it imposes constraints.

The second way in which objects participate in social action is through ‘composition’2. This refers to the fact that, if in order to achieve a goal an actor uses an object, then the reaching of the goal is a ‘common achievement’ (ibid.: 181) of both actants: ‘The chimp plus the sharp stick reach (not reaches) the banana’, writes Latour (ibid.: 182). To apply this to politics, one could think that a local political representative plus a mobile telephone and a car conduct a very different kind of activity than that run by a party leader with a mobile phone, a car, a blog, a Facebook page, a website and several offices (not to include countless support staff and relative resources). Action is therefore not the property of humans only, but of ‘associations of actants’ (ibid.).

The process through which the nature of all actants is transformed by the very fact of entering into a relationship (man + gun; chimp + stick; local political representative + mobile phone; party leader + mobile phone + Internet + blog + office + support staff) is called ‘translation’: ‘I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modi-fies the original two’ (ibid.: 179). In this sense, as for White, entities are ‘produced in relations’ (ibid.: 4), and also politicians, as indeed all social actors, are ‘network effects’ (ibid.: 5).

The role of communication technologies

This understanding of the social universe and the role of technologies within it is valuable for conceptualizing the role of the ever-present com-munication technologies in politics for three reasons. First, it underlines that communication technologies are not just a passive infrastructure whose role is enabling the establishment of relationships or, in other words, allowing the transmission of messages from a politician to a voter. Although scholars who talk about the ‘mediatization’ of politics – poli-tics becoming dependent on a ‘media logic’, that is in practice having to become ‘newsworthy’ – claim that this is different from ‘mediated poli-tics’ – media used to convey political messages – in reality they do not

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treat media technologies differently within the two conceptualizations. Media, whether news organizations or communication technologies, are always seen as the conveyors of messages. In ANT, instead, media technologies are actants in the social actions (here, political processes) being performed. As such, in the process of translation, they transform both their own nature and the identity of those being connected – the politicians. An elected representative who makes use of a technology with global reach, like the Internet, or who routinely gains exposure to national television, is not the same as the politician who does not make use of that technology or lacks that coverage.

At the same time, as a second point, ANT allows the researcher to place technology into perspective. This particularly refers to avoiding the demonization of communication technologies (especially television or the Internet) and their effects on politics. Politicians behave the way they do, which might include careful orchestration of their image, not because of the mere presence of the media (as in some kind of Eisenberg effect), but because they are actor-networks – the outcome of constella-tions of relationships in which they are involved and the scope of which is altered by the technologies.

Third, ANT warns against the generalization of the effects of com-munication technologies on political processes beyond the single case study – a tendency in political communication research that James Stanyer (2008: 420) criticizes as ‘naïve universalism’. In fact, in an ANT perspective, there is absolutely no point in establishing comparative research designs to further our understanding because the action of every actant is embedded within a specific constellation of relationships in a particular time and space. This makes every actor-network unique. Latour (1999: 150) takes this point to the limit by arguing that even mate-rial substances, which our common sense would suggest cannot possibly change across time or space – are not chemical substances always made by the same configurations of atoms? – are still the product of specific networks: ‘A lactic acid ferment grown in a culture in Pasteur’s labora-tory in Lille in 1858 is not the same thing as the residue of an alcoholic fermentation in Liebig’s laboratory in 1852’. The very way of categorizing what was an inert substance in 1852 as a yeast in 1858 reveals a shift in the two scientists’ views of the world: respectively ‘a world in which the rela-tion between organic matter and ferments is one of contact and decay’ (‘yeast is ... an unwelcome impurity that would hinder and spoil the fermentation’) and ‘a world in which a ferment is as active as any other


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already identified life form, so much that it now feeds on the organic material, which instead of being its cause, has become its food’ (‘the yeast has become a full-blown entity’) (ibid.: 116–117).

Taking White’s and Latour’s social embeddedness to its logical end, nothing could ever be learned outside the uniqueness of the network configuration at any given time and space. This study, however, takes a more moderate stance. While recognizing the specificity and uniqueness of the context in which the personal image of each politician should be understood, it supports the crucial role of comparative research in sen-sitizing the investigator to difference and variation (Hallin and Mancini 2005: 216).

Symbolic interactionism

To complete the explanatory framework of the role of personal image in politics, we need more closely to tackle presentation, an important aspect within symbolic interactionism. The term ‘symbolic interaction-ism’ was coined by sociologist Herbert Blumer (1969). This approach essentially believes that people always experience the world through the interpretations and ideas that they have about it. Reality is shaped by the meanings people construct, and such meanings, in turn, are affected by the interactions that people have with each other. Blumer developed his thinking through philosopher George Herbert Mead’s understanding of the way in which the self experiences itself in society:

The individual experiences [him-/herself] as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group. [We become objects to ourselves] just as other individuals are objects to [us] ... it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience. (Mead 1934, in Charon 2010: 72)

The self is therefore socially constructed through a continuous process of interaction. Identity, in this view, is ‘part of what we mean by self ’: ‘the name we call ourselves’ (Charon 2010: 84). The presentation of the self through appearance is part of that identity. As Charon (2010: 147) writes:

actors are often able to effectively present themselves to others. They announce their identity in obvious or subtle ways. They may dress to kill, put on a smile, decorate their office or house with the ‘in’ colors, or present

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toughness or honesty. Usually they are honest attempts to present identity; sometimes they are trying to fool us.

Presentation provides a wealth of information to our social interlocu-tors even before we open our mouths: socioeconomic status, attitudes towards them, trustworthiness, competence (Goffman 1959: 13). Social actors constantly seek these clues to ‘know in advance’ what is being expected of them and how best to act in each situation (ibid.).

Clothing, in this respect, plays an crucial part. As Alison Lurie (1981, in Charon 2010: 147–148) eloquently phrases it:

the idea that even when we say nothing our clothes are talking noisily to everyone who sees us, telling them who we are, where we come from, what we like to do in bed and a dozen other intimate things, may be unsettling. To wear what ‘everyone else’ is wearing is no solution to the problem, any more than it would be to say what everyone else is saying. We all know people who try to do this; but even if their imitation of ‘everyone’ is suc-cessful, their clothes do not shut up; rather they broadcast without stopping the information that this is a timid and conventional man or woman, and possibly an untrustworthy one. We can lie in the language of dress, or try to tell the truth, but unless we are naked and bald it is impossible to be silent.

In this sense image (presentation, clothing, appearance …) can be consid-ered a reflection of the individual identity, not some kind of concealment or artificial veneer used to hide something different. For Goffman (1959), the whole of social life is performance: the very fact of being in contact with other people and communicating with them means that we are con-stantly on stage. In this respect, according to him, there are two kinds of communication: expressions ‘given’ and expressions ‘given off’. The former refers to ‘communication in the traditional and narrow sense’; it is mainly verbal and is about conveying information (ibid.: 14). The latter is the ‘more theatrical and contextual kind, the non-verbal, presumably unintentional kind, whether this communication be purposely engineered or not’ (ibid.: 16). Consistent with Harrison White’s relational understanding of the world, the ‘image’ or ‘performed self ’ is a result of the whole network of interactions in which the actor (the politician, within this study) is involved. Importantly, there is no ‘true’ or ‘unchangeable’ self (as if it were some kind of ‘pure essence’) behind the ‘performed self ’. Identity is always staged and changeable depending on the constellation of relationships:

A correctly staged and performed scene [social situation] leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation – this self – is


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a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited. (Goffman 1959: 244–245, emphasis in original)

Although the self, and the image it projects, are relational outcomes, this does not mean that the social actor does not act creatively. As Goffman (1961, in Charon 2010: 172) points out, often social actors purposely distance themselves from their formal (expected) roles in certain situa-tions – for instance, a teacher might mention a popular song to suggest that she is not different from the students in the class. Or an MP might remove the tie he would not be seen without in Westminster while meet-ing the farmers at the local market in Yorkshire. The implication for this study is that the image of politicians can well be carefully staged, but this neither means it is fake – it is the outcome of the networks of relation-ships within which the politician is located – nor that it is the exclusive creation of the politician; instead, it is the result of negotiation between the demands of the social interlocutors (the general public, journalists, other political actors, the voters and so on) and the politician’s identity.

Consistently with this framework, the study has examined the connec-tions between the image of the interviewed politicians, their identities, their relationships with the communities of fellow citizens they represent, and the way in which communication technologies and media coverage have affected/constituted/transformed such relationships. These aspects are presented next through a wealth of examples.

Notes

Horton and Wohl (1956) would call Calhoun’s indirect relationships ‘parasocial relationships’.There are further ways in which objects participate in social action (Latour 1999: 183–190). They fall beyond the focus of the analysis here.

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4Findings

Abstract: Drawing on the many voices of the British and Italian politicians interviewed within the study, this chapter illustrates the findings of the empirical investigation. As will be explained, the data patterns defy the expectations (hypotheses) of the ‘mediatization’ approach to self-presentation in politics and can be more effectively explained by focusing on the way politicians, at the local, national and supranational levels, construct their identities through both direct and mediated (via communication technologies and/or media coverage) relationships. The point of this chapter is to demonstrate that it is not that the ‘mediatization’ approach is wrong, but that it is insufficient to cover the diversity and variation that characterizes the world of politics beyond the narrow focus on party leaders at election times.

Keywords: age; class; communication technology; constituency; electoral system; identity; local media; media coverage; media management; media system; mediatization of politics; party system; political culture; professionalism; social networks


Findings

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What emerges from the empirical investigation is a completely dif-ferent world from the one described by existing studies in Political Communication. Indeed, it looks like current notions of a ‘profes-sionalization’ and ‘mediatization’ of politics, and the phenomenon of ‘celebrity politics’ almost literally apply to a handful of politicians within each country. In the UK these terms might in fact only refer to three party leaders: David Cameron (Conservatives), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) and Ed Miliband (Labour). What is at the moment generalized to the whole reality of political processes represents noth-ing more than the tip of the political iceberg. There is a whole political world that works according to different rules. Throughout this chapter I will illustrate this hidden domain (at least from the point of view of most academic research) through the voices and experiences of British and Italian politicians.

The reason I was able to “see” this different reality within the data gathered is twofold. Part of the insight is related to my use of a com-parative research design, particularly two case studies which have not been examined before in relation to the topic at hand – this adds to the originality of the findings; the other part is the adoption of an ontology of the world, the one presented in Chapter 3, that recognizes as relevant to the analysis more than the macro structural factors that tend to characterize the ‘mediatization’ approach. With reference to the last point, an important aspect that the illustration of the politi-cians’ experiences will convey is that, focusing on the way in which the individual identities of the interviewees – at all levels, from the local councillor to the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) – are constructed through multilayered networks of relationships both direct (face-to-face) and mediated (through the Internet, media coverage and so forth) with their constituents, is a more effective way of explaining why they project the self-images they do. The ‘mediatization’ variables that were discussed in the methodology section – party- and electoral systems; media system; size of constituency; political culture – and which have provided a rationale for the comparative research design of the study still apply, but they can themselves be read in relational terms. An electoral system, for instance, is nothing but a set of norms regulating the establishment of networks of relationships between vot-ers and political candidates. The ‘size of constituency’ variable, to give another example, can be conceived to refer to the fact that political representatives are enmeshed in relationship networks with different

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scopes and the membership of which covers citizens with varying interests and values. This relational reading, which emphasizes the establishment of ties among individuals and how/why they are estab-lished, opens up opportunities for a much deeper understanding of the way a politician’s personal image is constructed. Always with reference to the ‘size of constituency’ variable, once a researcher starts focusing on the relationship between political representatives and constituents, he/she can grasp how this involves far more than mere physical dis-tance. MEPs and local councillors, in fact, as the interviews colourfully demonstrate, do not deal with clone-like constituents who only differ for being geographically closer or further away from their elected representatives. Rather, MEPs and local councillors deal with different kinds of individuals, with different needs and different expectations. Most of the time politicians interact with multiple audiences, as in the case of MEPs who communicate with ordinary citizens in their home countries at the same time as with colleagues in Strasbourg and, depending on the policy issue they deal with, transnational interest groups. It is ultimately these interactions that affect politicians’ choices of how to present themselves to their interlocutors.

It is true, as will be shown below, that some general trends can be identified. In most cases they tend to run along the lines of the ‘media-tization’ hypotheses drawn in Chapter 2. This does not mean, however, that the variables on which the hypotheses are based are able on their own to explain the range of variation in politicians’ self-presentation within the study. Political representatives’ personal image appears indeed to be affected by the size of their constituency, to continue with the previous example. Local councillors’ self-presentation tends to be less relevant than for national-level politicians: when everybody in your neighbourhood has known you on a personal basis for 20 years, to put it bluntly, it does not really matter how you dress, while if all that constituents see when you spend most of your time in Westminster is a picture of you on the television screen, you understandably tend to care more about appearances. Yet it is not just the physical proximity between voters and their representatives that affects a politician’s self-presentation. There are also further variations related to generational change (age), professional background and personal past experiences, even within the same cohort of interviewees (either all MEPs, or all local councillors, for instance). These aspects cannot be explained but

Findings

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through examining the collectively/socially constructed identity of each politician. Each representative also tends to match dressing codes to the specific social engagement in which he/she is taking part – meeting the farmers at the local market rather than sitting through a parliamentary session in Strasbourg – which reminds us that self-presentation is relationally constructed through social interaction at any given time, and therefore is flexible and constantly changing in its everyday unfolding1. The analysis thus draws a picture of politicians’ self-presentation in Italy and the UK that exceeds the rigid structural framework of the ‘media-tization’ approach: it neither smoothly nor exclusively follows the lines of a country in which a politician operates, a political- or party system, media system, constituency level, or national political culture in which political activity takes place.

I will further illustrate the way in which the image of the interviewed politicians is always a relational outcome throughout the rest of this chapter. First, I will explain how, from the point of view of all elected representatives in this study, image is truly crucial in politics, but not because we live in an image-obsessed media age. Squarely countering the widespread notion that appearance is replacing substance in poli-tics, the interviewees’ experiences will show that personal presentation is key to a representative’s political effectiveness, particularly to the task of practically tackling a constituent’s problem. Image management, as we will see, for all the staged media stunts of high-flying political lead-ers, is not an activity with which most politicians become engaged – indeed even want to get involved in. Second, I will revisit the variables of the ‘mediatization’ approach that were discussed in Chapter 2 and the hypotheses they generated to show their explanatory limitations, particularly their inability to account for the whole range of nuances in politicians’ self-presentation within the two countries under study. Change in the way personal image is constructed and projected to external audiences by the interviewees, instead, is more effectively explained through the analysis of the networks of relationships of which each politician is part. Third, always within the proposed new relational approach, I will discuss further aspects that, despite being entirely neglected by the literature, emerged as particularly salient in the study in explaining the construction of the politicians’ identities and, as a result, in shaping the self-image each representative projected to the respective constituents.

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The role of self-presentation actually

Self-presentation, as virtually all interviewees suggest, is truly crucial in politics. This has far more to do with professionalism rather the aes-thetic- and media-centric reasons suggested by the literature.

The importance of being professionalWe all have an image of ourselves that we project, whether we carefully manage it or not. Virtually all interviewees are not trying to convey an image of themselves in the sense that they plan it. On the contrary, they genuinely seem to be interested in presenting themselves for who they are. At the same time everybody realises that first impressions do count. In the words of a Leeds Labour Member of Parliament (MP): ‘If you have no interest in the way you look and present yourself then people will get a bad impression and think you really don’t care about them either’.

This, however, is not a concern for politicians only, but relates to all professional environments. In fact, when I asked the interviewees whether their image had changed over the years, most of them said it had not. Those who said it had, identified the threshold of change as their entering the job market rather than becoming a politician. I am now going to get more into the details of how image is an integral part of the interviewees’ professional role, which most of them see as ‘serv-ing’ their respective communities, particularly helping fellow citizens in ‘solving problems’.

Gaining the interlocutors’ trustA first way in which image helps politicians fulfil their role is in gain-ing the interlocutor’s trust. The ultimate purpose of communication, for most interviewees, is not gaining votes, but addressing somebody’s concerns. This is particularly true at the local level, where issues are as concrete as it gets: housing, waste collection, anti-social behaviour, planning permissions, dog fouling… . In this context the first priority of most councillors, as a Labour councillor for the Pudsey ward in Leeds points out, is projecting a professional image, so that the constituents will trust them in solving their problems:

Q: How do you present yourself, for example, in what you wear, when you meet your constituents? Would you dress formally or casually?

Findings

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... I think I’ve done both. I think even if it was casual it would be smart casual. I think people want to have confidence in you, and therefore I think I would veer on the side of formal even for one-to-one meetings ... because I worked in courts while I was working. You know, I was used to wearing jackets and suits and things, so I tend to carry on wearing those, and I think people want to have confidence in you and I think if you dress too casu-ally ... smart casual is okay but if you dress too casually or look a little bit scruffy, I don’t see how people are going to have confidence that you can help them and do what they need. So that’s just my opinion. You know it is that confidence that they need to know, that they have to feel that you’re a person that will take it forward and how you dress can convey that at least initially.

As another Leeds Labour councillor (Headingley ward) points out, dressing smartly is important to show that politics is a ‘serious business’:

I think candidates should always wear suits. You should always dress like it’s a professional job, though I think once you’re elected that’s less important than the fact you should dress comfortably and approachably, although for important matters I’m always “suited and booted”, as the expression goes. But I think you should convey that you take it very seriously. You should always convey that. You should do. It’s a challenging role and you should be up to that challenge.

As part of projecting a professional image, some women councillors pay attention to removing accessories that might be ‘distracting’ from communicating with their constituents. The following exchange with a Labour councillor for the Pudsey ward in Leeds also underlines, besides this point, the many identities of political representatives, as all social actors. Here I had asked the councillor whether she wears any accesso-ries or make-up:

I always wear a little bit of make-up – a little bit of eye shadow, mascara and a little bit of lipstick. That’s about as far as I go. Jewellery: I do like to wear earrings and a necklace, yes, and a watch probably. But not massive amounts. Not anything that’s distracting. I like to wear some, but I like to keep it fairly discreet because if you’ve ever watched a newsreader on televi-sion if they’ve got something like large earrings or something on, you get distracted from what they’re saying, so I don’t want people to be distracted by what I’m wearing. I want them to concentrate on what I’m saying ... . Yeah, so I like my jewellery but not to ... I mean I like big earrings when I’m going out socially but not when I’m representing, when I’m being a council-lor, because of that. I just don’t want it to be distracting.

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Q: So, in that sense, there is a slight difference from a moment when you meet your constituents and act as a councillor and when you go out socially?

Yes. I’m a bit more flamboyant when I go out.

While the statement in our conversation shows that the councillor is involved in some kind of ‘manipulation’ of her image, this is not at all geared towards presenting herself in a better light for aesthetic reasons. Instead, it serves the purpose of more effectively fulfilling the task of gathering information about the constituent’s problem. Image, in fact, needs to strike a crucial balance: on the one hand one wants to look pro-fessional enough to inspire trust in one’s ability to tackle a problem; on the other hand one wants to avoid looking intimidating. As she further explains, constituents are often distressed, and it is important to put them at ease, so that they can ‘open up’ and, by explaining their situation in sufficient detail, enable the councillor to ‘make a difference’. This applies to clothing, but also involves the way of talking to the constituent:

It’s a matter of putting people at their ease and trying to get as much infor-mation from them about what their problem is, what is the underlying cause of the problem, but sometimes how they present it ... . Do you know, they’ve got a view about it but it might not be quite accurate; it’s what they feel.

...

Over the years I’ve developed a much more friendly way, you know, try and get them to sit down, [and ask] ‘How are you?’ You know, not just go ‘Right ...’ I used to go ‘Right, I’m Councillor [surname]. What is your problem today?’ And you know ... not sort of breaking the ice at all. It’s just a matter of learning that you need to give people time. You know they’ve built up the courage to come and see you, and it can be often quite difficult problems, quite upsetting problems that they’ve got, and they sometimes need time to get it out and often, as I say, we’re here to speak for vulnerable people who can’t speak for themselves, so you need to give them time to say what they want to say so that you can make sense of it and help them. So, yeah, I think over the years I’ve learnt that, as I said to you earlier, I never promise that I’m going to make it alright. What I promise to do is I’ll do everything in my power.

RespectAnother reason why image is important for the professional role of the interviewees is that it conveys one’s respect for the constituents. This

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applies to all politicians across the board. This comment by a Labour Leeds councillor for Kirkstall shows not only the importance of looking ‘respectful’ but also how that look can manifest itself, in practice, in dif-ferent outfits depending on the time of the year:

If it’s summer time and very hot then I think everyone will forgive you at a normal meeting to go in an open-neck shirt and flats, but you’ve got to be smart. If you’re scruffy, then I think they’ll say ‘He doesn’t respect us’. If it’s not that kind of day, then if I was going anywhere I would certainly wear a suit, and it isn’t that I concern myself very rigid in terms of social terms – I’m just the opposite – but my courtesy to people that, if I go there, I don’t go looking like scruffy ‘Devil lift them off the street’ after a night on the booze and lying in the gutter.

The effort at looking respectful does not apply only to meeting people in person, as a Yorkshire and the Humber MEP for the UK Independence Party points out:

Q: I’ve seen several pictures on your website in which you are wearing a tie and a suit. Would that be the way you normally present yourself?

Yes. I believe quite strongly ... in fact you’ve got me on a subject on which I believe quite strongly. It’s my belief that if you’re on television you’re going into people’s homes. You’re going into their living room, and I think that’s what happens when you’re on television. If you’re going onto a platform and speaking to people – people have come in and sometimes maybe paid to hear you speak, maybe two or three hundred people – I think that it’s your responsibility to present yourself with respect to your audience. This is where I think a lot of politicians fall down, is that they’re scruffy and they’re badly dressed.

Self-confidenceThe way a politician dresses does not only convey a professional image to onlookers. As a female councillor from Leeds explains, it contributes to building the self-confidence that constituents expect from a political representative:

I just tend to wear formal jackets to suits even if I’m wearing trousers with them because ... the more nervous I am, the more formal I will dress, you know, so if I’m making a speech in Council or something like that, I will dress more formally to give me confidence. So it’s not only about exuding confidence, it’s about feeling confident yourself. So I haven’t one piece of clothing, but I do tend to like suit jackets because I feel more confident in those.

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Social expectation and appropriatenessOn the point of social expectations, it generally appears that the MPs and MEPs are expected to dress more formally than local councillors. This is mainly due to their more frequent attendance of official meetings. The following excerpt of a conversation with a Leeds Labour MP shows the role of interlocutors’ expectations on a politician’s choice of “ward-robe”. More specifically he provides concrete examples of the variation of politicians’ outfits depending on what is socially ‘appropriate’ to the occasion:

When I go to the farmers’ market on a Saturday in Oakwood, I will just wear a jumper and casual trousers and a jacket because I just don’t think it’s appropriate to wear a suit at a Saturday morning farmers’ market when you’re meeting the public there. You know, nobody else is wearing a suit. But today [24 February 2012] I was at a school, I was at a formal presenta-tion at the hospice, I’ll be going to a presentation by Leeds City Council this afternoon, and I’m going for a radio interview. People expect you to be fairly smartly dressed. I think it’s what’s appropriate for the occasion really. Weekends I will not wear a suit unless it’s something like the Holocaust Memorial Day, which is a really formal event, then I will wear a suit and tie, or Remembrance Day, for example. But most Sundays and Saturdays when I do my advice surgeries, I’ll just dress like anybody else, and I think people appreciate that. They don’t want you to look like some posh person, but they do expect you to be presentable when you’re in a formal setting.

According to a Yorkshire and Humber MEP for the UK Independence Party, the pressure to be ‘well presented’ is greater for MEPs than other politicians because not only are they in a public office, but they should represent their respective countries. Here is a lengthy but entertaining excerpt in which, with his characteristically flamboyant style, the MEP delivers his assessment on the importance of presentation:

Well, it’s interesting that you should call me today on this subject [the role of image in politics] because if you listened to the news this morning, Vivienne Westwood was speaking and saying that the British have never been scruffier and dirtier. You know, they’re appalling. And I believe she’s absolutely right, and I believe it’s our responsibility, as society’s leaders if you will, to present ourselves looking clean and tidy, and if you look at me and if you look at my boss, Nigel Farage [leader of the UK Independence Party], you will find that we are both, if I dare say, immaculately turned out at all times and, you know, my suits come from German Street and Saville Row and my ties do. It’s my job and also in the European Parliament to

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project myself as an Englishman representing my country as well as my party. It’s my job to look smart and my wife always says ... . You know, you get these politicians who dumb down, don’t you? They take their tie off, you know, to be ‘one of the people’. That’s very patronising. That’s very patron-ising, and my wife always says a businessman, a politician who takes his tie off to be one of the people when he’s wearing a collar and a jacket just looks like a drunken businessman. Show me a picture of a politician without a tie, and he just looks like a drunken businessman, so it’s demeaning, it’s patronising. It is your responsibility if you are in public office representing your party, representing your country, to dress accordingly.

Q: So even this idea that by removing the tie you are going to be closer to the people is not true? Are you suggesting that people are ready to accept you [formally dressed] anyway because you have a representative role?

Yes, I believe it’s absolutely vital ... . And people don’t like it [to dress down]. When I was at an investment bank in London ... . You’re probably too young to remember something called “Dress Down Friday” – but you probably know about – on Friday when everybody came in ... in casual clothes and that didn’t work. Nobody liked it. The women didn’t like it because it meant, of course, ... a whole new wardrobe for you ... because smart casual, you go ‘just a minute, I’ve got a wardrobe for business, I’ve got a wardrobe for the weekend, I’ve got ball gowns – what the hell does smart casual mean?’ And then you have to go and spend a great deal of money on a whole new wardrobe for Fridays at work, and so it was unpopular, particularly with the ladies. Middle-aged men look terrible in casual clothes. Middle-aged men, and I am one, look like a sack of shit tied up in the middle in casual clothes. You have to be smart if you’re going to look the part, and if you’re coming in, if I was investing your pension fund, if I was investing millions of pounds for your pension or your company’s pension, you would expect to see me properly dressed, properly turned out. It gives you confidence in the same way that if you go into hospital: you want to see a nurse in uniform and a doctor in a white coat. It sends out the right correct message.

However, while politicians – as all social actors – tend to conform to rules of appropriateness, it does not mean that expectations of their ‘audi-ences’ or interlocutors entirely shape the representatives’ choices about the way they present themselves. A 84-year-old Leeds Labour councillor, for instance, explains that wearing dinner jackets at ceremonies would be, in the past, considered some kind of political betrayal by his party’s colleagues, but he still did it because it was important to him:

some of my colleagues from early days thought I was a traitor by wearing dinner jackets [at official ceremonies]. Well, I used to have to go to dinners

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and functions. I could have gone in ordinary clothes, but I just think if you buy one best suit, it’s your best suit, and I got my second best dinner jacket when I became Lord Mayor because the first one had lasted me 20 years, so when I had to wear a dinner jacket I had one there that had lasted me 20 years. That was a very good buy, and the dinner jacket I’ve got now I hope will last me until I peg out. So as a sort of person who comes from a poor background, and who is not poor now, you think of those things, and I just think it’s a good buy, a sensible buy. No, I’m not afraid to appear in a dinner jacket amongst my Labour colleagues because they accept that there are certain things you do. In the services I wore a uniform. If I was going down the mine, I wouldn’t wear my best suit; I’d wear old clogs. So I think we all accept that your appearance is an indication of the respect you show to them.

Another example is provided by a former mayor of Milano, now MEP for North Western Italy (Popolo della Libertà, centre-right on the political spectrum). He underlines the scope for politicians to interpret creatively what is ‘socially acceptable’:

Q: I see from your website that you tend to present yourself with suit and tie. Are there circumstances when you present yourself differently?

Well, there are circumstances when I presented myself in my pants! [laughs] If you go to YouTube, you will find out about it. I had inaugurated a swim-ming pool by diving instead of cutting the ribbon, which no other mayor has done.

While self-presentation is crucial to the politician’s job, this does not mean, as we are going to see next, that personal image is faked or stage-managed for publicity purposes.

The unimportance of image managementImage is important to politicians, as it is to all social actors. The inter-views, however, suggest that the notion that politics nowadays revolves around appearances is a gross exaggeration. The unanimous feeling among interviewees that politics is about ‘doing things’ is well reflected by the words of a consigliere comunale in Brescia for the civic list Brescia per Passione [Brescia Out of Passion]:

Politics today is not at all about image. I am talking about good politics. Bad politics revolves around image and many other negative aspects. I believe that good politics revolves around projects, visions for the future and programmes.

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In this context, as a consigliere comunale in Iseo put it: ‘You can project whichever image you like, but at the end of the day it comes down to: “Can you solve my problem? If you can’t, you have to explain me why”.’

What a politician concretely achieves is ultimately what matters. This applies across the board of interviewees. The fact that “image is not everything” is confirmed by the importance that all the participants in the study attributed to actual contact with the respective constituents. The conversations, in this respect, demonstrate that the literature on the mediatization of politics tends to exaggerate the ‘distance’ between poli-ticians and voters in an era in which, so the argument goes, traditional party structures have collapsed and media coverage is the only connec-tion left between citizen and political representative. The interviews, on the contrary, show that personal contact is still key to politics, no matter whether at the local, national, or even supranational level. In the next section, among other points, I am going to show the continuing relevance of old-fashioned meetings – even for the politicians who are furthest from their constituents: the MEPs – and the fact that personal contact and mediated communication are not mutually exclusive

The limits of the ‘mediatization’ approach

The variables that are most often used in political communication litera-ture to explain the mediatization of politics are not able to fully account for the range of variation in the way politicians’ project their personal image within the case studies examined. I am going to discuss each vari-able, showing its explanatory limitations and illustrating how the alter-native relational model I have developed is more effectively equipped to make sense of the way politicians construct their self-presentation.

Party and electoral systemsThe evidence in the interviews suggests that the party system and the electoral system, by themselves, do not play a significant role in affecting how important self-presentation is for politicians in Italy and the UK. The hypotheses were that personal image would matter more in the UK, which is both closer to a biparty system – a higher level of ‘per-sonalization’ of politics than in a multiparty system – and characterized by a first-past-the-post voting system – where preferences are expressed for a candidate rather than for a party, as in Italy. The expectation was that British politicians would be more concerned about managing their

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personal image than their Italian counterparts. Political representatives across the board in both countries, however, appeared to reject equally strongly the practice of manipulating their own self-presentation. I am going to address this issue next. I will return to the impact of the electoral system later, particularly when discussing the role of the ‘constituency size’ variable. There I will show that the electoral system, especially the ability for voters to express preferences on the ballot, has an effect on politicians – particularly Italian MEPs – in terms of a pressure to “be seen”. This effect, however, only materializes in combination with other factors, such as a lack of national media coverage of European issues. But let us return now to the widespread rejection of personal image manage-ment, even at election times, regardless of party and electoral system, country, level at which political activity takes place, and ideological orientation of a politician on the political spectrum.

The rejection of image managementThe most frequent reaction, when I asked my interviewees whether they had ever received any recommendation on how to dress/present themselves from either consultancies or the respective parties, was laughter. The great majority of interviewees never received any training whatsoever. Some Leeds local councillors attended courses organized by the Council about media interviews, chairing meetings and how to interact in the Leeds Council Chamber (related to etiquette and use of microphones), but they never received any training related to image management or public speaking. The conversations with MPs and MEPs suggest that also at higher-than-local levels there is no real effort at image management.

Contrary to the expectation that politicians make use of consultants as a matter of routine, I noticed that, especially in Italy, some interviewees were irritated, almost offended, at the very suggestion that somebody might be telling them how to present themselves in public. When I asked an Italian MP for Partito Democratico [Democratic Party] (centre-left on the political spectrum) whether he had ever made use of image consul-tancy services, he said: ‘Nobody would ever dare to offer me this kind of services [image management] because they know that I would tell them to get lost ... I hate this kind of companies ... I dare to think that I do not need them’. A female consigliere comunale for Lega Nord [Northern League] (right)2 in Brescia goes so far as imagining punching in the face those who offer media and image management services:

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Look, once I received by post ... – if I had had them there I would have killed them! – a company offering me this kind of services, such as somebody who could write my speeches. I am perfectly capable of speaking in public even without having prepared because, modestly, I have a certain culture and a certain brain. And also one has to see the “climate” [the public mood] of the time [in every circumstance]. Perhaps I have planned to say something, but then, given the “climate”, perhaps it is better that I steer towards another topic. And they [the consultancy company] would have offered me ... to take care of my image ... . I would have liked to punch them in the face if they had been there ... but it was just via mail. And obviously I did not reply. They did not contact me anymore. They did not offer. ... No ... it’s inconceivable. I am myself. If other people want, they can come and take lessons from me [laughs loudly].

An MEP for the UK Independence Party admitted to having received media training before becoming a politician:

I was a spokesman for a big investment bank when I was a younger man, and I did all that training when I was not involved in politics in the 1980s because I was going to be radio- and television-platform spokesman for a very big leading investment bank, and so I got my training there, which came in very useful, of course, after I went into politics.

When I asked, however, whether he had ever received instructions on presentation from his party. his reply was: ‘No [laughs]. Good Lord, no.’

A Labour MP for Leeds had attended the famous Barbara Follett sessions on colour. The attention to his presentation, however, as he sug-gests in this example, has not been shaped by the training, but rather by his previous background in graphic design:

Q: Did you ever receive any training about how to present yourself from your party?

Not really. I went to Barbara Follett’s colour management course back in 1992.

Q: Okay that’s very interesting. You’re the first to mention this.

Really? What was it called? Colour something anyway.

...

It’s this kind of formal course that she used to do about matching your skin tones to the kind of colours you were so that you’re either spring, summer, autumn, or winter. I was winter, actually. But, you know, if you’re autumnal, you can wear kind of dark greens and browns, whereas if you’re winter you

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have to wear brighter colours. So, I mean, I think that was fairly superficial, but I try to dress in a coordinated way, but that’s about the only training I’ve ever had in how to present myself.

Q: And do you think this has changed the way you present yourself, in the sense that you have perhaps tried to put into practice any of these recom-mendations she was giving?

Not totally. I mean, I think there were some sort of commonsense things, but I’ve always been fairly self-conscious about how I present myself because I was for many years a graphic designer and graphic design is about colour and form and proportion and things looking good, so I always had a bit of a, I won’t say artistic eye, that’s probably exaggerating a bit, but a sense of what looks right and what doesn’t and how colours match with each other. I’m fairly good on colour toning. And then, you know, there’s sensible things like my hair’s thinning, so just keep your hair short if you’re a man, and I’ve got a beard, as you know from the website. It’s fairly well trimmed, so it looks neat in that I don’t look like a drunk on the streets or something. People do like their representatives to look presentable and to look right, and it’s a case, as much for men as for women, though women are better at doing this, of presenting yourself appropriately, not just for the way you look and your features and the clothes you wear but for your age as well. I’m now 57 this year, and I look rather different to what I looked when I was 42 and I was selected, and I had a very black beard and a fairly full head of hair. You know, it’s what’s appropriate. If you’re a man, don’t grow your hair long and comb it over the bald patch because that looks terrible, and accepting that as you grow older you present yourself slightly differently to a young man or woman.

The experience of former mayor of Milano and currently MEP for Popolo della Libertá [The People of Freedom] (centre-right) is particularly interesting. The following excerpt shows his rejection of image manage-ment in favour of ‘naturalness’, which he believes both better reflects his independent personality and is appreciated by his constituents:

Q: Is there a quality you are particularly keen to communicate to others?

I do not follow a discipline for my communication. Simply, I try in every circumstance to be myself. I behave with naturalness and simplicity, try-ing to express what I really think and what I feel ... with naturalness and simplicity. I do not know whether this works, but so far it has worked since I have always been elected and re-elected with a wide consensus of votes. At least as far as the relationship with the electorate is concerned, it has worked in my previous experiences. I do not know whether it will work in the future, but so far that’s how it has gone. As for the relationship with

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colleagues, there too. Perhaps they might not have particularly, let’s say, great admiration for some qualities that I do not have: for instance, I am not a professional politician ... I am a free rider, I am not disciplined with the party [line], and so on. But they regard me as trustworthy and as a seri-ous person. A person who, when he says something, then he does it, and somebody who says what he really thinks. So naturalness is the key to my communication.

Q: Have you ever received any recommendations about how to present yourself?

During my electoral campaign, I had been assigned consultants. I am talking about 1997, the first and true electoral campaign I have run. I had a group of consultants who followed everything related to communication, including this aspect [of personal image]. And I remember that I also had a couple of consultants who had instructed me also about this behaviour. But after a short time ... well ... we broke up ... I mean ... with me, it did not work. I could not get into a role that was not mine. I did not manage not to be myself. So at the end, even the final output, the result, was the exact opposite of what one was aiming for. It was much more agreeable and valid, even from the point of view of the quality of image and the [electoral] consensus to be achieved, and so on, the sincerity and naturalness of [my] behaviour rather than the script that was being forced on me to conform to some cliché of [political] candidate.

...

Q: Could you give an example of something you were asked to do, which you did not approve of?

Instruction about debates, for instance. The cliché was that to a question one has to answer aggressively if there is some polemical dimension [to the debate], and then one has to hide the boundaries of one’s own ignorance, or something like that. So one always has to give a better image of oneself than the real one. I contested this way of presenting oneself: if somebody asks me a question I am not able to answer, I answer that I cannot reply and explain the reasons why I am not informed about that particular issue, but [I can add] I think it is important to know about it and I commit myself to find-ing a proper answer or gathering more information about it. It is not that because there is a political adversary I need always to quarrel with him. If I agree with his thought, a part of his argument, or some objectively sensible observation, something in which I can recognize my own positions, then I can agree with him, even if he belongs to another [political] team, of course. It was this. They wanted to impose on me some clichés, which perhaps are those of the “good presenter”, the “good candidate”, the “good politician”. But in my case, they did not work because I myself refused them, thinking

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that also voters would refuse them because they would have seen a piece of theatre rather than reality.

Especially television, in some respects, is ruthless. Because in some close shots, body language is subliminally understood by the interlocutor. So, for example, a Sgarbi character [Vittorio Sgarbi, Italian art critic, cultural commentator, politician, and TV personality], you look at him and admire him, you appreciate him [and you might think] ‘How well he speaks!’, but he does not communicate trustworthiness. In fact, one would think he is even too good in communicating. Then even this narcissism of his [carefully messy] hair. You admire him, but you do not establish a relationship with him, because one can see that it is a piece of theatre, in his case very well executed, of an exuberant and very egocentric personality.

Q: Are you suggesting it is perhaps better not to have such a perfect image, but a more natural one?

Yes, exactly. What I suggest is, do you know what was written on the Greek temple in Delphos? ‘Know yourself ’. In my case, this is ‘be myself ’. I am inspired by the ancient wisdom [laughs], the one that was taught to me by my Jesuit fathers when I attended the Liceo Classico [secondary school].

This experience is consistent across the political spectrum, as confirmed by another Italian MEP representing Partito Democratico (centre-left):

Q: Do you pay particular attention to your image, especially since you have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a website? Do you ever have the impression, for instance, that you are “being watched” all the time?

Since I started being involved in politics, I paid attention only and exclu-sively to one kind of image: trying to be credible and consistent. Neither can I make any difference to my beauty or ugliness, nor am I interested in doing that. I do not think I need to dress in one way or another in order to appear like a person I am not. You have to be yourself. As far as I am concerned, doing this activity [politics], one has to show the way one feels. And I feel like the only thing that one has to “spend well” with public opinion, the citizens, whether those who have voted for you or not, is to be credible in the things you do. If you cannot achieve them, then explain why you were not able to. You need to be consistent. These are things that might not give you much notoriety in the short term, but in the long term, they will pay off.

... Q: Did you ever receive any recommendations about how to present your-self, for instance, from political consultants, not only about the way you dress, but about the way you speak in public or talk to journalists?

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I can assure you that at the beginning of electoral campaigns there are usually many who explain you how to restructure your image ... but ... no, no, I have never made use of them. The only thing you perhaps can make good use of is, in case you need to take some pictures, then in that case you really need a photographer. You can’t do it yourself with the self-timer [laughs]. If they [photographers] ask you to pose one way or another, sometimes you follow their suggestions, but this is the only “retouch” that applies to me.

The very low level of orchestration in presentation also applies to media management and the alleged obsession with “being on message”. Politicians who are not party leaders, as it is suggested by the interview-ees, tend to talk more freely. An MEP for the UK Independence Party explains his personal belief in saying what he thinks, which also fits with his party’s commitment, as he points out, to ‘tell the truth’ that other parties do not dare to tackle:

it’s my responsibility to tell the truth. The problem is with modern politi-cians, most red [Labour] or blue [Conservatives], that they don’t tell the truth. How many times have you heard a television or radio interviewer with a politician being cross because he certainly didn’t answer the question? It must have happened to you a million times. You know, the questioner asks a question, and the politician simply doesn’t answer it. So I made it my business when I was first elected in 2004 to tell the truth at all times, and therefore I didn’t have to worry in the future, I didn’t have to wonder, ‘What did I say last time?’ You know, if I said it last time, this is what I believe now. So if I said something in 2004, I’ll say it in 2012, and there aren’t many politicians that can say that, and also, without sounding too arrogant, I’m usually right. If you look at my speeches or even, if you don’t have access to that, if you look at the articles and lectures I was giv-ing – I was a lecturer at Cambridge University for a while in the ‘90s – if you look at what I was saying, you’ll find that I’ve been right, so my record is very good.

While there is a general lack of effort in staging one’s image, some interviewees admit the importance of moderately exploiting one’s looks to be ‘recognizable’. A Labour Leeds councillor for Headingley, for instance, explains how he played up his ‘big hair’ during his local campaign and how this benefited him in a situation of very little funding for advertising:

I have large hair which, when all the photos for our campaign literature were taken, I had almost like ... . Are you familiar with The Simpsons? ... Slightly

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Sideshow Bob hair, you know. the way it was all sort of waxed and spiky and quite long? ... Not looking like that, but there was a hint of that. There’s my sadly now defunct campaign website, but if you put into the Internet [url] ... , you’ll see what I mean, and I’m kind of stuck with that hairstyle now, which is always a joke, but I confess to keeping that – shirt, tie and big hair. I’m not nondescript looking, shall we say, with big specs and big hair, yeah. It doesn’t hurt, you know. It really doesn’t hurt. But there was no conscious effort for that apart from the fact that halfway through the campaign, I realised, because people were starting to recognise you when we came to the door, because obviously we’d leafleted an area and then you follow up with canvassing and then people would recognise me, and that was an interesting experience. That was the first time that’s ever really hap-pened, as you can appreciate, so I’m kind of stuck with that. So that process kind of turned into a conscious effort, I guess, by polling day. Do you know what I mean? You really want to be visible.

Q: So you cultivated the image of the ‘big hair’ for that purpose, for being recognised?

A little bit, yeah. I mean it’s how I normally have my hair anyway. It’s not quite so big at the moment, I must admit, but it’s how I am normally so ... . It sounds very trivial, but we don’t have advertising budgets; you know we don’t get pots for political broadcasts. We don’t have money for adverts in papers so, you know, all these little factors that can help ... we have willing teams of activists to leaflet, and we have them to door knock, so you have to maximise those two aspects, and anything that breeds familiarity should be considered ... I think ... as long as it’s sensible and serious, yeah.

Beyond all this, the idea that politicians need to manage or even change their image because they are under the media spotlight at all times (we can add the fact that any member of the public can at any moment steal a picture and shoot a video through a mobile phone) does not make sense in the context of local politics. Most interviewees have been living for many years in their respective constituencies. They have an image that has been shaped by personal interactions over decades. As an Italian consigliere comunale from Iseo points out: ‘It does not make sense to change your image [once you get into politics]. You were voted for who you were, so it obviously works’.

Media systemIn relation to the media system variable, the hypothesis based on existing literature had led to expect greater attention towards media management by politicians, including concern about the way one’s image is projected,

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in the UK (which is close to a biparty system; journalism aspiring to objectivity) rather than in Italy (multiparty system; commentary- oriented journalism). British politicians, whose parties all tend to converge towards the centre, need to differentiate themselves in their attempt to appeal for as many votes as possible. In a journalistic tradition that aspires to report-ing objectively and critically, there is scope for “managing” the presenta-tion, both of one’s self and a party’s policies, which leads to the thriving of spin and media management. In Italy, instead, given the span of the political spectrum, politicians are ideologically more diverse to start with. The existence of partisan media – each outlet tending to support the candidates sharing similar political leanings and opposing those who do not – defeats the very purpose of politicians’ spin.

Again, not only is this supposed national difference not confirmed by the experience of the interviewees, but there is a lack of interest by the mainstream media in both countries in political representatives beyond the figures of party leaders.

Beyond the ‘media’ and the ‘(national) media system’Two widespread assumptions within the literature on the mediatization of politics are that advances in communication technology make a dif-ference in the way political actors communicate with the public and that journalists from national media outlets are interested in what politicians have to say. New communication platforms (like social media beyond the Internet), in this perspective, are tools reporters can and will use to cover politics in a media landscape that is becoming more competitive and dominated by tighter deadlines. On such a fast-changing, image-obsessed, 24/7 media treadmill, politicians are under pressure to manage their self-presentation in order to “look good” at all times. The experi-ences of the interviewees, however, challenge such notions in at least three respects.

First, politicians who are not party leaders hardly get any exposure in the national media limelight at all. An Italian MP for Partito Democratico, who is also a modern history lecturer at the University of Parma and who has been mayor of Brescia from 1992 to 1994, explains that he received far more media exposure as a mayor than as a parliament representative:

Q: Do you now, as an MP, receive less attention than when you were a mayor?

Much less attention, much less attention. Also because the number of Italian MPs who receive great attention is that small elite which belongs to

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the “star system” of politics. Because I do not belong to the star system of politics, I get attention only when I take my turn to speak or I act within the boundaries of well-defined domains, which are the domains of my own town [Brescia] or those, let’s say, of cultural activities, the world of scholars and so on.

Q: What do you mean by ‘star system’?

It is that world to which 30 or 40 political figures belong, who show off in talk shows or camp on newspapers’ pages, who speak at conferences often without even knowing what the topic is.

Second, there is a whole media landscape that is ignored by political communication literature: local media. This does not only affect local councillors but, in a deeply interconnected world, also MEPs. Here a Labour MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber explains that she does not normally receive national media coverage, but that issues she tackles that are relevant to local areas are picked up by local media:

Q: Do you get a lot of media attention?

No, oh no, not really, no.

Q: The EU [European Union] seems to be a very unpopular topic in the national media. Would you confirm that?

Well, the EU gets lots of negative press in the tabloids, in the national tab-loid media. In local media you get some negativity. There are some people who campaign. But you’re competing for local stories with local politicians and Members of Parliament. The truth is that there are fewer local news-papers, and fewer people who are buying newspapers. So, yes, I get some press coverage, but I don’t know whether it’s more or less than a Member of Parliament. It’s hard to judge, because we cover huge regions whereas Members of Parliament only cover parts of Leeds, you know, whereas we are covering the whole of Yorkshire and the Humber. There’s lots and lots of newspapers. And those newspapers will pick up on a story depending if it’s a local issue for their area. For example I noticed this morning [6 March 2012], I’m in the Whitby Gazette [Whitby is a small coastal town in North Yorkshire], which is about fishing. Obviously fishing is not such a big inter-est in South Yorkshire ... it’s not a local interest.

Third, the newsworthiness of a political representative is a relational out-come: it is not purely dictated by the rhetorical features of what one says. In this example an MEP for the UK Independence Party explains that he tends to get more national coverage than other MEPs because of his party’s position within the UK political spectrum. Although he points

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out that traditional parties, especially Conservative and Labour, tend to get most media attention, being a minority party is, in this respect, an advantage because it provides alternative, controversial – and therefore newsworthy – stances:

I certainly do more radio and public speaking than most other MEPs, you know, by quite a long way, but that’s largely because of the party. We are the Independence Party, and we’re the only party advocating self-rule; you know, home rule for England. So we tend to get a disproportionate amount of time when it comes to European politics. So I do a lot of television and radio and public speaking that my fellow MEPs probably don’t do.

Q: Could this be related to the fact that traditional parties get perhaps more access to mainstream media because they belong to the ‘red or blues’, as you say?

That’s quite right, yes. So, for example, their ministers and shadow minis-ters get prime time television all the time, and so the media don’t seek out a red or blue MEP because it would be of no journalistic interest to them. Whereas we, because we’re taking a completely separate view from the establishment, you know, we do get proportionally more on these issues.

On the other hand, a further example from Italy shows that even the fact of being located at the margin of the political spectrum and provid-ing unusual policy suggestions does not necessarily guarantee coverage. This even applies to party leaders. A consigliere comunale in Brescia for Lega Nord – a party which has advocated independence for the North of Italy – points out that the members of her party constantly have to put up with either a ‘smear campaign’ or a coverage-blackout by both the national and local media. In the following excerpt she presents her view of the widespread prejudices against her party and the consequences such stereotypes produce on the way the leghisti (representatives from Lega Nord) access the media:

Bossi [Umberto Bossi, party leader of Lega Nord] has been demonized, he has been presented as a person with no manners, ignorant. Well, I know him personally. He is absolutely a decent well-mannered person. I ate next to him several times, and he uses cutlery correctly [ironic tone]. Just to tell you ... there is a programme on a TV channel here in Brescia [local TV] where politicians are interviewed at the dinner table while they are eating. And by the way, in my view, either I eat or I give the interview. I am going to spoil my meal if I am speaking ... [Anyway] They never invite leghisti. It’s because there is the stereotype, the prejudice, that the leghista perhaps eats with his hands and chews with his mouth open. For me, that’s what it is ... the

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demonization of Bossi and of all his [political] children. Absolutely I have been discriminated, penalized, mobbed in some quarters, absolutely ... and in the face of others’ rage I just keep on going calmly and serenely. ... I can’t let them affect me!

Here she elaborates on the ‘journalists’ dirty games’:

If you look at the Giornale di Brescia [local daily newspaper], at the reports which come out the following day about what gets discussed in the Consiglio Comunale [Council meetings]. I was there 24 hours [the whole time], I read it [the report], and I have no idea what they are talking about. And then they [journalists] write that that woman [a female consigliere who spoke at the meeting] ‘put up a storm’. No, the woman, because maybe she is a relative of the owner of Giornale di Brescia, said ‘bif ’ [nearly nothing] for two seconds. How many times have I made some good contributions [to the discussion] and I have not been mentioned at all in the newspaper. Once I made an ironic comment meant as a joke and I got a headline, as if that was what I had really thought [about the topic]. Eh ... the journalists are playing dirty games. Because they are pushing forward some people while they are obscuring others. Obviously, I have no godfathers, no people who protect me, I have no friends, no relatives [in the media], and on top of this I am “the one from the Lega [Nord]”, so let’s stigmatize her, let’s put her into the “things-to-forget-about-box”. I must say that I am at the receiving end of this dirty game. But all the Santanché-style people [Daniela Santanché, minister for the Implementation of the Government’s Programme 2010–11 during the Berlusconi government] at the national level, and other people at the local level – I am not telling you who because I do not want to be sued. If they were forced to demonstrate what they have done in the last few years in a tough question time, if they had to show their real essence, I would make the bella figura, not them, who are some sort of journalists’ coupmonté [put-up job].

This, in turn, affects the way the leghisti present themselves to the public, particularly the importance they attribute to wearing their party colour – a bright green. This tendency sharply contrasts with the experience of virtually all other interviewees. Most of them never do that. Some would wear rosettes at election times only, but even those are regarded as ‘daft’ and ‘banal’. The main reason against wearing party colours – note that literature on political marketing and branding attaches great importance to the consistency of delivering the message, including sticking to the party colours – is that councillors, consiglieri comunali, or even MEPs, are there to serve all the members of their communities, not only those who

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voted for them. Another reason the interviewees raised, which might sound trivial, but it matters when it could affect the way a politician presents him-/herself every day, is the fact that one’s party colour might look ‘terrible’ on one’s complexion. An example that kept emerging was, in the UK, the bright yellow of the UK Liberal Democrats.

Going back to the Lega Nord and its special connection with the colour green, a male consigliere comunale in Brescia emphasizes how the green colour is used to enhance the visibility of the party, as a sign of distinc-tion in a media environment in which, as pointed out earlier, it does not appear to gain recognition and coverage:

We [local representatives of Lega Nord] usually wear the green tie or the green pocket handkerchief, which is our colour, we have a white flag. You know it, don’t you? With the Lega symbol.3 We have this habit [to wear green] when there is a particular occasion, like the Council meetings, but also on ordinary days. It’s not compulsory, let’s be clear. It is something one should feel, and normally we do. It is, in fact, a form of distinction. We are, well, keen on that.

As he further points out, wearing green also has deeper meanings. In the following excerpt he shows that there is a certain level of pride in wearing the party colour as a reflection of the commitment of local rep-resentatives to their community, almost as an act of defiance against the national and local ‘smear campaign’:

We have always had the TVs [national and local], which have always attacked us and they still do it, and they portray us like a group ... I do not want to get into that ... the critiques we receive are monstrous. They make it sound like, in our group there are only, I don’t know, boors, but it is not like that at all. Now people have come to know us, especially in the last five years of government, they know who we are and who they are. I am talking about my colleagues ... [but] it [Lega Nord] is a sample of society as with all other parties. This feeling of belonging to our land of the North is related to the fact that we have felt exploited for 60 years [by the centralized gov-ernment in Rome], to put it in short [ ... ] The problem is that we are tired of supporting [economically] the mafiosi, the magnamagna [thieves], so to speak, those who are pillaging these lands of people who are hardworking, who have always given everything, even at a social level, and now when we need something, perhaps we have to face difficulties due to this waste of resources. This is why we feel strong in our movement, why we are keen to be seen, to be noticed, to let people know that we are not afraid to show that we are from Lega Nord. That’s it: because we feel we are right.

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Finally, beyond the position of a party on the political spectrum, it mat-ters whether a candidate belongs to a political group that is in govern-ment or opposition. As a consigliere comunale in Brescia for Popolo della Libertá explains, opposition politicians get easier access. In his case, as he elaborates, being a member of the majority coalition, once you have been elected, it becomes difficult to get coverage unless you are one of the key figures within the comune administration:

There is a difference ... between being a majority and an opposition con-sigliere. Because, clearly, an opposition consigliere a contestation role ... , a role easier to fulfil because on every stance of the majority the opposition is free to take the initiative and say what it wants. It’s easier. As for the major-ity consigliere, actually, he is almost forced to stay within the boundaries of the party if he does not want to create problems to the majority. [He has] to stick to the agreed line. So it becomes difficult to gain visibility. In the sense that there is a council leader [capogruppo] of the party, then you have the assessori [the equivalent of ministers at the comune level] and the mayor. They are the most representative and visible figures. Once they have spoken, it is clear that the opinion of the majority consigliere is rather redundant. It is of scarce value [not newsworthy].

Constituency sizeConstituency size was hypothesized to matter: it was predicted to make a difference in the extent to which politicians use communication tech-nologies rather than face-to-face exchanges. The causal chain, more specifically, was expected to be the following: the broader the scope of the constituency, the greater the distance between voter and political representatives, the greater the need for politicians to presents them-selves through a television screen or a photo shot, hence the higher their attention to the personal image they project. While the interviews confirm that distance does affect the extent to which politicians rely on technologies for communication with their constituents, there is more to this than current research would lead to assume. Distance (greater size of constituency) does not exclude the combination of technologically mediated contact with remote voters with face-to-face interaction. The absence of physical proximity also does not mean that aesthetics necessarily becomes more important than policy substance. There are also different publics, each of them with different needs and expectations, whom a political representative might want to address, some geographically far away, others much closer. The attempt to

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communicate with these multiple cohorts ultimately affects the com-munication strategies – and with them, the self-presentation choices – of elected representatives. These aspects will now be illustrated in more detail.

Political communication strategies as a relational outcomeThe strategies implemented by politicians to stay in touch with their constituents – one could say the very extent to which a representative feels the need to do so – are the result of a combination of variables, not only distance from the voters. The following exchange with an Italian MEP for Partito Democratico is particularly significant in this respect. It not only highlights the way in which European representatives combine the use of new communication technologies and face-to-face meetings to communicate with several million constituents. It also demonstrates that the concrete form taken by the political communication of an elected representative is not shaped exclusively by geography and the availability of technologies (as the literature seems to suggest), but is truly an outcome of the constellation of networks in which a politician is located. A first key shaper of such an outcome is that MEPs receive virtually no coverage in the national media, which leads them to rely on alternative channels of outreach. The second is the electoral system, particularly the existence of the preference vote, which forces them to keep themselves visible to their constituents, so they can vote for them in the next election:

Q: I see you have a website. Do you use it to communicate with your constituents?

Usually, yes, I have a website where I post what I do. I write editorials, especially about topics I am most closely dealing with. Being the president of the European Parliament Delegation that has relationships with the Arab Maghreb, the topic of the Arab Spring and what is happening [in the Middle East] is strongly felt, and so I write about that. Also, usually once a month I send my [electronic] newsletter in which I tell about my activities, the conclusions of the Strasbourg [discussion] round, and also political news. I send it to a good number of people.

Q: Who do you send this newsletter to? Who are these people?

These are people who belong to my mailing list. People’s contacts I have been gathering across the years. Normally, whenever I go to a meeting, I always go with a form. I tell those who take part in these meetings that, if they like, they can receive updates about what I do and think. They can

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just subscribe to the free newsletter. On this basis I have gathered the data [details] to send the newsletter.

Q: How many people are on the mailing list?

About 40,000.

Q: I am interested in the issue of visibility. I get the impression that MEPs do not enjoy great visibility from the point of view of national media. The European Parliament, usually, is not a source of great interest for the public. Would you confirm this?

Yes, yes, it is absolutely true. There are three obstacles against this possi-bility [of MEPs gaining visibility in national politics]. The first is obviously the treatment [of European issues] by the national media: they are very far from the idea of Europe, or cover it only and exclusively when, for instance, there is conflict of a national nature in Europe. And this is not good. It is not good. Because it is a way of bringing the European Parliament to the same level of national parliaments, where there are often only rhetorical fights, if not worse. So it is a wrong way [of covering European issues]. And in addition to this, it does not contribute to building that political culture oriented towards Europe, which we absolutely need. So this is the first obstacle. The second obstacle derives from perceptions, which are obviously an outcome of the first. The perception that public opinion has itself constructed about Europe. And here there is also a responsibility of national politics. If one looks at the Eurobarometer statistics, one can see that a few years ago there was a very positive attitude towards Europe. Now a bit less. This is because responsibilities have been dumped on Europe, which actually belong to national governments, that is, those who had to show, and still do, that they are up to the challenge [of governing]. And when they are not, it is easy to find an alibi [by saying] that ‘It’s Europe’s fault, it’s Europe which is demanding this, it’s Europe that does this.’ Well ... [at a loss for words]. And the third obstacle is that, obviously – and I say this with great conviction and determination – that we need to work here [Strasbourg]. It is here that we carry out our work. But we are more than 1,000km far from home. ... One has to wait until the end of the week when one returns [home] to travel the land and spread the message. And this makes the idea of Europe less felt. And in addition to this, we have one more problem. As all countries have their own electoral law, the Italian MEPs are elected on the basis of preferences. So we are constantly on the battlefield. Necessarily so. If we [MEPs] are too much here [in Strasbourg], as it is right to do, then one forgets about us in Italy. So at the next elec-tions, if one runs again, many will wonder ‘Where has he been?’ While he was just doing the work he was committed to.

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Q: How do you make yourself known to the voters then? The constituency you represent is truly vast [15,000,000]. Even if you have 40,000 people on your mailing list, we are talking about an overall population of several million. If people never see your face on TV or do not know you person-ally, how can they express a preference for you on the ballot? How do you tackle this problem?

One uses the new informatic tools: for instance, Facebook and Twitter are important in this respect. They will not establish a European political culture, but at least give an idea that [one] exists to start with. Then the newsletter. Then also the TVs. Every now and then I am on them. I attend the political debates, especially on local TVs [there are over 600 of them in Italy (De Rosa and Portanova n.d.)] – even if nowadays there is nothing that is local anymore as everything is interconnected, so to speak. So these are the three main tools I use. Finally, the normal activity one does: this evening [8 March 2012] I am returning to Italy, but I have another meet-ing. Tomorrow I have two more. Saturday two more. And Sunday morning yet another. It is true that one does not reach millions of people, but I can assure you that if one keeps on organizing meetings every week, each of them attended by between 50 and 100 people, at the end of the year one will have achieved something. Finally, one also uses the tool of bringing several groups of people to the European Parliament in Brussels, to get them to know the Parliament, invited by the MEP. This is another tool to get yourself known.

Social networksTo show how politicians are often enmeshed in overlapping social net-works, I present the example of an Italian MEP for Popolo della Libertá. He explains how there are multiple audiences a politician might want to reach out to. As an MEP he identifies two domains: the public back home (mainly indirect relationships) and the colleagues within the European Parliament (direct relationships). Further demonstrating the importance of one’s personal background, particularly career history, in how an elected representative presents him-/herself, he explains how, having been mayor of Milano, his public image is ultimately shaped by the fact that many people already ‘know’ him and the policies he implemented:

I am, yes, MEP and elected in a constituency of 14,000,000 voters, with a preference vote besides everything, so if I do not know them, they have to know me because they have got to write my name on the ballot ... My personal experience is very much shaped by what I have done during the nine years I was mayor [of Milano]. Yes, I am MEP, but my image, more

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than for what I do here [Strasbourg] is known and, for those who voted for me, appreciated because it left a mark through my experience as mayor. So ... I do not know them personally, also because they are so many those who have written my name [on the ballot], but my relationship with them is very tight. At least [this tight relationship exists] at the level of opinion, of exchange, of dialogue [with the public] rather than [with the party] apparatus, organization and consensus. This is something I have never followed, perhaps inappropriately, but this is my personal history and my attitude.

Q: I would expect you take care of your image for the sake of your rela-tionship with the 14,000,000 voters, but I am sure you also have to deal with other politicians at the European Parliament. Who do you actually communicate with?

I would distinguish the two domains. The one with the citizen, the voter, in my case, being my vote an “opinion vote”, rather than a “[political] appa-ratus vote” for the party, I communicate through the personal contacts I happen to have by attending public meetings or even simply in the street, but above all through the media and the local TVs, less national TV since I am not often invited. Then there is the whole network of the Internet, I have Facebook, this kind of [electronic] world, and then the newspapers and the press. This is as for my relationship with the voters. In relation to my relationship with institutions, first of all with the European Parliament, well, there it is all based on personal relations: on dialogue, meetings, col-laboration exchanged and returned, basically on the application of good manners and good intentions.

The crucial role of personal contact, both mediated and unmediatedEven if some political representatives might operate most of the time geographically out of sight and reach of their constituents, as in the case of the MEPs, this does not mean that their personal image is going entirely to replace face-to-face communication.

It is true that local councillors tend to be most directly in contact with their constituents. This particularly applies to those representatives who have been living in their own ward for decades. A Leeds Labour coun-cillor for Kirkstall, for instance, was born in Leeds in 1928 and became politicized at a very early age. He started as a small child by helping his father, who campaigned for the Labour party, to deliver leaflets, and then became politically active in the 1945 elections when he was a teenager. He joined the party in 1946 and has been a continuous member without break since then, except for two years when he was called into the Royal

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Air Force (‘and as an officer ... we were not allowed to have politics’). He was first elected to the Council in 1957 and has now been councillor in the same area for 55 years.

Even if British MPs and MEPs do not live in their constituencies, how-ever, they go out of their way to travel back and meet their fellow citizens as often as they can. A Leeds Labour MP would be back from London on Thursday evenings and spend Fridays and the weekends meeting local people and campaigning. An almost identical schedule applies to British and Italian MEPs.

Countering the hypothesis that image becomes more important the further a politician is from the citizen, this excerpt from my conversation with an MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber for the UK Independence Party underlines the role of personal contact with his constituents, espe-cially when European issues appear far removed from the everyday life of local citizens. Here he gives an account of his activities in Yorkshire during the week:

Q: Being an MEP, do you still have contact with local people? I would imagine that you are in Strasbourg or Brussels most of the time ...

Yes, I do [have contact with local people]. I make it my business. Some of our MEPs pretend they live in Leeds, but they don’t. They live in Antwerp or Brussels. No, I’m very much part of the community. Yesterday I was at a big church service for the Beverley Minster for the celebration of our judiciary, for example. I shall this afternoon be out hunting in the north of the county with the Middleton Hunt. I make it my business to spend a lot of time speaking – tomorrow morning at a school in Harrogate; I’m speaking at another school the following week. So I do an awful lot of work in Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, my constituency. I think the problem with the politicians is that they lose touch. You know, I’m going to speak at Durham University the week after that, and I stay. I don’t just speak and come away. I stay with undergraduates at universities. I stay over at a hotel, and I stay with them in the evening and I stay with them in the pub so I can find out what they’re thinking as well. There’s no point in just one way. There’s no point in them just knowing what I think. I’ve got to know what they think; otherwise, how can I possibly reflect their views?

...

Q: So contact with your constituents and the way you present yourself to them is important ...

Oh, certainly. I mean I think if you spend time with people who don’t in the main have a great interest in politics you see ... . You and I have an interest

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in politics because, you know, it’s what we do for a living in one way or another, but your average butcher, baker, or candlestick maker doesn’t have a great deal of interest in politics. He votes at election time, but apart from that he doesn’t really make any assessment of politics impacting on his life. Of course, it does. We know that it does. We know that every rule and regulation that he is trying to cope with in his little business comes from Brussels but he doesn’t know that. He thinks the regulation comes from Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] or the Food Standards Agency or the Financial Services Authority. He doesn’t realise that these are political rules and regulations he’s following. He thinks they’re made locally in the main by the local Council and people like that. He doesn’t understand that these political decisions are affecting him.

Personal contact is therefore a way to get constituents interested and make them realize that European-level issues are actually relevant to everyday local life. This shows anticipating a point I will make in the last part of this chapter while dealing with further factors that affect politicians’ self-presentation, that the nature of the political issues has an impact on the extent to which personal image affects a politician’s public perceptions.

In a context in which the bottom line is that facts always count more than appearances, the self-presentation of a local councillor tends to matters less, because this political representative will be judged by con-stituents in the very short term by his/her ability to solve an immediate practical problem. By contrast, for MEPs, self-presentation, more often in face-to-face situations than one would expect, is more important: the effectiveness of these representatives is harder to assess for the public not only because of the longer term issues they deal with – policies that might take long to be discussed and decided upon in Brussels – but also because of the lack of media coverage of European issues at national level. MEPs need thus more strongly to establish close local relation-ships, to leave a “good impression” of themselves, and “make a case” for their activities.

This close contact of non-local politicians with constituents has a deep impact on personal image and involves the need to present themselves positively, sometimes through demeanour rather than mere appearance. A Leeds Labour MP underlines the fact that his ‘image’ is balanced by the direct experience of him as representative that thousands of his con-stituents have made over the years. He also emphasizes the importance of a person’s behaviour beyond the ‘looks’:

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Q: Would you say that, as an MP, sometimes image is “all you have”? I imagine that many of your voters don’t know you personally ...

They don’t. Image is important, but image isn’t everything, and I do not agree with presenting an image over substance, over what you actually do, and I do try not to be superficial. And, of course, you’re right, I can’t know 90,000 electors personally, but I do know an awful lot of electors now. I’ve been an MP now for four terms. This is my fourth term, so 15 years is a long time, and you inevitably meet quite a few thousand people and, of course, you won’t know everybody, but I’d like to think people judge me by what I’ve done, by what I’ve said, what I’ve achieved rather than simply the way I look. But you’re right, that looks are important, but it’s not just the way you look or the way you dress, it’s the way you address people, it’s the way you talk to people. If you’re not patronising and you look people in the eye and you’re interested in them, then they will respond appropriately, and I think that’s really important, to show the respect and courtesy to every individual, and even people who don’t agree with you and argue with you, to be polite at all times. I’ve only ever once lost my temper with a constituent who was par-ticularly annoying, I have to say, and he wasn’t going to vote for me anyway, but it’s not a dignified thing to do, and even if they provoke you, you should never fall to that provocation. So I think being polite, being friendly, sincere and honest, genuine, that counts for more than simply the way you look.

Political cultureCultural aspects are important, but differences among interviewees did not emerge only at national level – the expectation was to detect greater care for personal image in Italy rather than the UK. While this was generally true, there were also further differences across generations, in both countries.

Especially in Britain, several middle-aged interviewees complained about the recent tendency for some young representatives to look ‘scruffy’. It appears that in the UK there is a considerable gap between being ‘presentable’ and ‘being scruffy’. In this respect, presentation is less of an issue in Italy, where the fact that one has to look ‘presentable’ in public is almost taken for granted. Especially Italian politicians who are in their 50s and 60s tend to wear jacket and tie at all times because, as a 64-year-old MP for Partito Democratico puts it, it is a matter of basic ‘good manners’. Having said that, public dressing codes appear to have been stricter in the past than nowadays. In this example, a 67-year-old consigliere comunale representing the civic list Yseo [sic] nel Cuore [Iseo in Our Hearts] explains the origins of his formal way of presenting himself

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in public. In particular, he recalls having being told off at a university examination for not wearing a tie when he was a student:

I am telling you an anecdote, so you know why I am always wearing a tie. I studied at the Catholic University outside Milano in the years 1964–1968. I did my first [oral] exam with Fanfani, Amintore Fanfani [1908–99, former prime minister of Italy and historical figure of Democrazia Cristiana]. I turned up in May, he taught Political Economy, so it was May, and I wore a white shirt, a jacket, without a tie. And he told me ‘Giovanotto [young lad], do you not have the money to buy yourself a tie?’ And from that moment on I have always worn a tie [laughs loudly] ... I had to go and buy a tie, and then I was examined. He would have not started assessing me without a tie. I had to rush down to Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, I bought the tie, I wore it and I did my exam. It would not have been tolerated to sit an exam without a tie. There was an iron discipline. You had to have jacket and tie at the Catholic University. It was the years 1964–68. One could not sit exams with a shirt ... It was a form of respect for the institutions and for the professor.

He further explains how he is now ‘disciplining’ the younger (male) members of the Iseo Consiglio Comunale who had started attending the official meetings without the ‘proper’ attire:

There were some young lads. I told them ‘Look, you have to wear a jacket and tie because it is a sign of ... [decency]’, and they have sorted themselves out, ah? Do you know that now they all come along with jacket and tie? [laughs loudly] So I have obtained something. They are two university students ... They used to come in jeans and jumper, and now they present themselves appropriately.

Beyond the way one looks in terms of clothing, how one presents him-/herself to the public and overall behaviour are also shaped by what might be called the local culture. An Italian MEP for Popolo della Libertá underlines here how his already mentioned ‘naturalness’ fits with the appreciation by the Milanesi of hardworking genuine people. In the fol-lowing part of my conversation with him he had just finished explaining that the visibility of a mayor of a town like Milano (second-largest in Italy after Rome, with over 1,300,000 inhabitants)4 is far higher than that of any national MP:

Q: From what you say, it sounds like, if you are a mayor of a big town, image is incredibly important, but it is equally important that this image genuinely reflects your personality ...

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Yes, of course, otherwise it will not work. The mayors for whom it did work ... myself included, it is not to show off, but even now, during the last elections in Milano, I got the same amount of preference votes that Berlusconi got, who was prime minister, eh! So I cannot say that my fellow citizens do not hold a good memory of what I have done, of how I was and how I am now. When I was mayor I got a record number of votes within the whole history of the Italian Republic. I almost got half a million votes. In the shift between the first and the second mandate, [I got] 120,000 [votes] more than those of my party. Which means that I got voted also by citizens who had a political allegiance to a different party than mine. So it means that this works. Especially in my town. The Milanese appreciates the effort, sincerity and honesty. Even if one does not manage to do what one was plan-ning to achieve. But the good will is considered important. And perhaps it is this that has also constituted the creative and propulsive force of Milano. Because Milano has absorbed ... with the Milanesitá [Milano-ness], which is this, the work, the effort, the discipline, the commitment to something, has absorbed a lot of trends that came from the outside. Enough to say that the patron saint of Milano [Saint Ambrogio] was born in Germany, no? And the greatest people from Milano were not born in Milano. There is a great quote of Indro Montanelli [iconic figure in Italian journalism], my great friend and almost stepfather, who said on the day of his 90th birthday, he said ‘What I am, I owe it to Fucecchio [comune in the province of Firenze, his birthplace]; what I have become, I owe it to Milano’, because Milano welcomed him. The Milanese saw in him somebody who wanted to be like him, committed, hardworking and so on, qualities that bring him [the foreigner] close to his humus [roots]. And this applies to the mayor, too. One might not be able to achieve everything [he wanted to achieve], but should do his best. And he needs, above all, to be himself.

I am going to return to the topic of cultural differences below, while discussing the way in which class and professional backgrounds – which one could argue are subcultures – affect politicians’ identities, particu-larly their dressing codes.

What else shapes self-presentation in politics?

We have so far assessed the role of the variables often singled out by the ‘mediatization’ approach as shapers of the role of image in politics. As seen, while most of them apply to some extent, they cannot account for the complex picture drawn by the data gathered in the study in its entirety. Not only the variables themselves can be conceived in relational terms – electoral systems being rules about the way voters and political

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representative establish relationships with each other, for instance – but their effects, where and when they materialize, are often the results of a more complex combination of factors than the variables on their own.

Here I am going to further add to the explanation of politicians’ personal image in the case studies under analysis by considering how elected representatives’ identity is relationally constructed and how this, in turn, affects the way they present themselves to their con-stituents, particularly in terms of dressing code. I will then move on to expand on a structural factor that has earlier emerged in the analysis: the nature of the issues a politician deals with on a daily basis. Despite appearing to have a strong effect on the extent to which political rep-resentatives, both in the UK and in Italy, rely on personal image in presenting themselves to the public, this aspect is largely ignored by current literature.

The link between individual identity and dressing codeThe expectation that self-image is becoming increasingly important in the age of celebrity politics appears a rather shallow assumption based on the idea that a political representative would necessarily want to “look good” on television (or YouTube), for the eyes of a distant electorate. Such a notion, while it certainly applies to some politicians – and would not anyone want to look good on video anyway? – is actually placed into perspective when one considers politics in its broader and more deeply social dimension. First, the data reveals that what ‘looking good’ means in practice depends on the politician’s negotiation of constantly changing expectations by the audiences with whom he/she is interacting at any given time. The evidence also suggests that there are several aspects that contribute to shaping the identities of the interviewees and, as an expres-sion of this, the way they live in social situations and how they, accord-ingly, present themselves. The relationship between dressing codes and class, the way the standards of what is acceptable to wear in politics have changed across the years, as well as the fact that presentation reflects an individual’s personal history, professional background and personal taste are discussed next.

Class backgroundAn 84-year-old Leeds Labour councillor, the oldest among the inter-viewees, who has been a political representative for 55 years, recalls the changes in dressing codes at the Leeds City Council over the years. His

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experience underlines how the standards of what is ‘acceptable’ to wear were shaped in the past more by class and the attempt to convey a politi-cal message than the desire to impress the voters:

Labour has controlled the Council in Leeds for a very long time, and it was controlling it ... [through] councillors who were basically working class. There were some middle class among them, but they were basically [mostly] working class. They all had the same ethos as I’ve been talking about where, if you went to a place like the Council, you put on good clothes, you were smart. No one would have dreamt in those days of going in with an open-neck shirt; they’d always wear a tie. Now sometimes they don’t wear a jacket at all; they’ve got shirtsleeves. That would have been unacceptable 25 years ago and times have changed, and I think it began with the Lib Dems who wanted to show that they weren’t stuffy like everybody else and so they were a bit more adventurous in their dress. They might wear a fairly brightly coloured sport coat rather than a suit, and there’s been a gradual change. So now if you came to our council – which at one time would have been full of suits and we have pictures of the Council chamber with all the councillors in, all wearing suits – right now you would find that quite a lot are in shirt sleeves and the Earth hasn’t fallen on them. You know, it hasn’t actually seemed to make any difference.

Q: So why are they more casual today? Is it to appeal more to the constitu-ents, to show, for instance, that they are “like them”?

I think it could be that, but most constituents don’t see them in Council, so most constituents wouldn’t have any idea what they would look like. I think some of them adopted this rather casual form of wear because it’s comfort-able and easy and cheap and so on, and they see no reason why they should put on a different suit to come into council. So I think it’s just a general reflection of the fact that styles have changed and that many people now find it quite acceptable to look scruffy by comparison to what they would look like wearing a suit.

Q: Do you think this is also related to a generational change? For example, people from your generation, as you say, share the idea that you have to be presentable, while maybe younger people are not as concerned?

I think that’s absolutely true. I think young people nowadays are very adventurous in dress. Some of them look hideous by the things they’ve worn, but that’s what goes on, and if you look over the last 30 years, styles have changed for young people.

Always according to him, presentation was far more important in the past when, if a politician had a working-class background, as he did, that

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person needed to be well dressed in order to engage people from upper classes:

I came from a working-class family. I’m now, I suppose, considered mid-dle class because I’ve got this OBE [Order of the British Empire] and then a CBE [Commander of the British Empire] and a councillor for all these years, but basically I still remain what I was, very working class, and when we were small and poor, we always had to put on our best front, make our best appearance, so we always had a best suit. Sometimes it was the only suit. But I’ve always felt that I was obliged to appear reasonably smart and reasonably dressed, conventionally dressed in order to gain the confidence of not just the working class but the middle class and the upper class.

By contrast, he continues:

the children of those early [Labour movement] pioneers – people my age or older – don’t have that same enormous pressure on them to look present-able because they came from a working-class background, and so I think we’ve become so much more egalitarian so that if you met the current Earl of Harwood, then you would not know he was the Earl of Harwood. If you’d met his father, who’s just died, you would know immediately he was the Queen’s cousin and significant in the Royal family. One generation changed, and it’s completely different.

Generational change and personal (professional) historyThe evidence from the interviews suggests that younger people, particu-larly in the UK, are less concerned about appearances. The conversation with a Conservative local councillor for the Calverley and Farsley ward in Leeds is an excellent example of how dressing codes reflect an individ-ual’s personality. The following excerpt shows not only how generational differences have changed taste in clothing, but also that specific personal circumstances have led to the councillor’s strong belief that appearance does not affect an individual’s ability to ‘do the job’. Additionally, being a stay-at-home dad, this councillor’s full-time family job has a practi-cal impact on to the extent to which he can “dress up” to attend official meetings:

Q: What would you wear when you meet your constituents?

Oh, gosh ... I’m rarely out of jeans and a hoodie, so much to the amusement of my colleagues here. They happen to be almost ... one of them is almost twice my age, and he’s rarely out of a suit and tie, and I’m rarely out of jeans and a jumper, so I am conscious that, you know, particularly because

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I’m around during the week, I find it more difficult actually to dress for a Council meeting and put a suit on. I have to make sure I’m up ten minutes early so I’m got time to have a shave and tie a tie and all these kind of basic things which I don’t do looking after the children, obviously. So for me, I don’t think how I dress or how I present myself is a barrier to people coming to see me. In fact, I always get jokes when I’m on the school run wearing a suit, you know, if I’m going directly from one place to a Council meeting or whatever it is, a site meeting with a planning officer, these sorts of things, where I would put on a shirt and tie, people always know almost not to talk to me because I must be dashing off. So I feel like I dress like most of the people that I see, and that’s fine with me.

Q: And do you think this perhaps helps making them closer to you, mak-ing sure that you look more approachable?

Yeah, I think so, and I mean, my background in the military was in the submarine service, and down a submarine it’s pretty grotty and very uncomfortable. You don’t judge people by how they dress because everyone looks a bit dishevelled. It was the most professional working environment I’ve ever been in, and it was a real lesson to me that actually what people wear has no bearing on how they do their job, and absolutely everyone, to a man, down that submarine did an excellent job; otherwise, it would be dangerous if they didn’t. It was a very pressured, intensive environment, and what people wore just didn’t matter, you know, and I’ve seen people put out a fire wearing their boxer shorts and a pair of socks because they respond to the situation regardless of how they’re dressed, and that’s how it should be.

So I do get picked up occasionally for going to meetings. I have one meeting which comes round every couple of months on a Friday afternoon, and on a Friday morning I’m looking after the children and I’m on quite a tight schedule to get to the meeting. I don’t normally bother putting on a shirt and tie, and none of my colleagues thinks that I should, but really I know it doesn’t make any difference to my contribution. You know, I’m not both-ered. I’ll wear jeans and a jumper there just like I do on the school run in the morning.

Q: Is it because, as you say, it doesn’t make any difference to your func-tion, to what you do at the end of the day?

Yeah, absolutely, and in fact one of the things I think is quite amusing about that is that I increasingly see national politicians dressing down as if this makes them more like the people. I don’t think anyone is so daft as to think that taking off your tie or rolling up your sleeves or removing your jacket ... . You know, if you have some of the gilded backgrounds that all the political leaders have in Westminster, really, in terms of their upbringing and their

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family wealth and all the rest of it, you know, taking off your jacket, people don’t [think], ‘Oh he’s taking off his jacket, he’s just like me’. There’s still a barrier to those politicians connecting with people, and it’s not what they wear.

The impact of personal history, particularly the experience of a specific professional environment, on a politician’s assessment of what is accept-able to wear is further emphasized by another example. In this case the background of a Leeds Labour councillor for Headingley as transport and urban regeneration consultant (at least a decade previously) still affects his relaxed approach to presentation:

Q: What would you wear when you meet your constituents, in practice?

Ties, hmmm? I’m not sure a Yorkshireman should knowingly put a noose around his neck ... [ironic tone]. No, I do. For meetings, scrutiny boards, important meetings, development plan panel meetings, full Council, I always wear a shirt, suit and tie. For community meetings, I always wear a shirt. I’m wearing a shirt now.

Q: But no tie?

Not often a tie, no; I’m not a big fan of ties. I tend to spill things on them for a start [ironic tone]. I don’t know when I wear a tie, it appears. No, seriously, I tend not to wear ... . Working in business in the private sector for ten years previous to being elected, I didn’t often wear a tie then either, and most people didn’t. One thing that was particularly noticeable, actually, was that if you were dealing with clients from London and the South East or fellow consultants of whatever, you know, transport, regeneration, consultant planning, often they wouldn’t wear ties, particularly from London. People coming up from London hardly ever wear shirt and ties. Suits, yes, and shirts, but not really ties.

Q: And why do you think that is?

Change in culture. Business fashions change. When I was sort of 15, 16 in the turn of the ’90s, you know, it was all double-breasted suits and silk ties. Well, soon that became to represent ... . I don’t know, that was eventually seen as vapid and untrustworthy, yeah, by the middle of the ’90s; so you know it was all single breasts and suits and ties. But ties seem to be much more optional now. It’s just a change in business culture. Maybe it’ll slide back the other way; I don’t know.

Q: Do you think it’s the business culture of your particular area of activity?

I don’t know. I think obviously a lot of people working in property development and that don’t wear ... . Yeah, smart casual would be the

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phrase. I went to a meeting of developers the other day, in the evening, and they were all smart casual. It’s seen as more approachable when you’re dealing with, I guess, elected members and members of the community, yeah.

Q: Could it be that you and your colleagues in this field of business deal with so many people from different communities that perhaps it [the no-tie style] is a way to look more approachable, as you say?

It’s kind of a default middleism. Yeah, it’s the most universally acceptable form of dress – shirt and jacket but not a tie – as opposed to going too much either way in the opposite direction, you know. You know, a three-piece suit and a tie done up would look odd in a community meeting. At the same time, if you were meeting councillors and Council officers, you know, turn-ing up in a tee-shirt and jeans would be the other way.

The nature of the issues with which politicians dealPersonal image cannot be more important than “substance” because most politicians, as the interviewees confirmed again and again, are judged on the basis of what they actually do. The following examples show that it would be absolutely unthinkable that local councillors and mayors – the latter, effectively, comparable to managers of sizeable businesses – were able to survive just through their looks.

A Leeds Labour MP explains that the nature of the issues with which politicians deal on a daily basis, and about which local fellow citizens feel passionate, makes local representatives more ‘accountable’ than in Westminster. This effect, in yet another instance in which one variable alone cannot fully explain the phenomenon being studied, materializes in combination with other factors: the local election system – there is going to be an election every year and, even if a candidate is not due for re-election, somebody else from the same party will be – and the fact that local councillors serve mostly part-time:

I think local councillors are much more accountable in many ways because they’re based in a smaller constituency. In other words, they’re usually a quarter or a sixth of a parliamentary constituency. They’re there all the time as opposed to being in London most of the week, and usually most local authorities have three councillors in each ward. It’s not a full-time job, so you would carry on working and doing whatever you normally do for a living, and that keeps councillors much, much more in touch with the people they represent, and it means that in cities like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool you have an election every year and a third of the

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Council retires and has to be re-elected, and that makes you much more accountable to the people because you’re facing an election even if you are not up that year; your colleague is and you have to work to get your col-league elected if you’ve got a colleague who’s also in your party. So I think the connection with the people is much stronger, and the issues are much closer to people’s hearts. So, yes, they [issues] may be boring to some of us – I mean, dealing with potholes in the roads or sewers or windows in council properties, council housing, crime, and things like that that actually affect lives in localities. They’re the issues that people really are passionate about, and you can actually do something about it a lot of the time.

A similar point is made by a Labour Leeds councillor for Headingley:

I think what people are looking for in Headingley, especially local elections, is ability and integrity and I think if anyone can convey that and convince people of that and then demonstrate that they’re successful, then I think that’s a far better advantage than anything, than any particular telegenic aspects. You know, all politics is local, so if you can convey your integrity, your abilities in residents’ meetings, in public meetings, in area committee meetings, that kind of thing, then that matters more than, you know, a full hairline.

Further to this, a Conservative councillor in Leeds for Calverley and Farsley suggests that attention to image by governmental figures is a way to deal with the fact that they cannot be judged on their effective dealing with issues in the short term:

It’s much harder for national politicians where the things they’re working on are maybe more complex, more difficult, take longer to get a result from. Perhaps they feel more pressured to present a good image day to day if they don’t have something that really they can say, you know, ‘I’ve done this today’. In my case, [instead] ... I’m not judged on how I look. I’m judged on the job I do.

The need to be competent is made extreme in a town like Milano, Italy, which can be compared, in management terms, to a huge company. Here again a former mayor of that town, now MEP for Popolo della Libertá, points out how the extent to which the idea of ‘inventing’ one’s image is, effectively, inconceivable:

Being mayor of a big town is a unique role than cannot be compared to other institutional roles. I will explain, also because I have myself inter-viewed those who, in turn, have been first ministers and then mayors of a big town. The mayor is the direct point of reference for thousands,

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tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of citizens, so his exposure is extraordinarily intense. Examining people who have been previously ministers, who have perhaps even done rather well, who have later become mayors, [I have seen that they] have not found themselves at ease because you cannot invent an image of yourself as a mayor. Because the relationship between what you have to do, the actions and the concrete contents of your decisions and what is being perceived [image] is too tight. So for a while you might invent some alternative reality. Do you remember what Lincoln said: ‘One can fool a small section of the public some of the times, the great majority for a while, but never the entire populace all the time’? This particularly applies when you are a mayor. Reality prevails over fiction. [Dealing with] potholes and services are concrete actions. You can make a good appearance at a conference, make a good speech, go on a talk show and make a bella figura, but if you cannot organize the huge enterprise of services within a comune ... . Think that the comune of Milano overall has a team of people who are directly and indirectly employed by companies controlled by the comune who process waste, who deal with the production of energy, airports, public transports ... – they are 40,000, eh! It is a huge service company. A true holding. So the job of the mayor is this. It cannot be compared [to other political roles]. The job of the MP resembles that of the minister. Although the latter is farther away from “his people”, it is less of a direct point of reference. The job of the MP is much more indirect, especially the MEP.

Notes

It is important to remember that the self-presentation of politicians does change across time, even within the same day, as part of the different activities in which they engage.Lega Nord is part of the centre-right coalition. On the political spectrum it is on the right side of Popolo della Libertá. The party is normally characterized as right, if not far-right, for some of its statements against immigration (Corriere della Sera n.d.).The flag can be seen here: http://efd-eu.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/lega-nord- italy-northern-league.html.Milano’s population exact figure is 1,324,110 (Comuni Italiani 2010).

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5A Different Understanding of the Mediatization of Politics

Abstract: This chapter further discusses the empirical evidence provided by the interviews by spelling out the limitations of the current literature and the analytical benefits of a relational conceptualization of personal image in political communication.

Keywords: communication; generalization of results; identity; media; mediatization of politics; personalization of politics; public; self; technology


Mediatization of Politics

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The relational framework I outlined to explain the role of self-presenta-tion in politics encourages the researcher to read a politician’s personal image as the reflection of the elected representative’s identity. This, in turn, is constructed through relationships that can be both face-to-face and mediated (via communication technologies or media coverage). As illustrated through the multifaceted experiences of the interviewees, such a relational view of political processes allows developing a radically different interpretation of the ‘mediatization’ of politics. More specifi-cally, it is possible to draw the following conclusive points:

There is no ‘new politics’. Michael Delli Carpini and Bruce Williams (2001: 161, emphasis in original) argue that, in the new media environ-ment, ‘individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences, family members, workers and so forth. Politics is built on deep-seated cultural values and beliefs that are embedded in the seemingly non-political aspects of public and private life’. From a relational perspective, not only is this absolutely true but it always has been the case: all social actors have multiple identities all the time. In this sense what we are witnessing today is not a different politics, but rather a transformation of society – something that relational sociologists acknowledge as an inces-sant process – in which the scope of social networks is simply enhanced by communication technologies.

Unmediated politics has never existed. Communication is the very ena-bler of relationships. According to Niklas Luhmann (2007: 302), ‘it is not action but rather communication that is an unavoidably social opera-tion and at the same time an operation that necessarily comes into play whenever social situations arise’. As such, communication has always been central to politics. Politics is communication.

All politics is relational. The study points out that the various ways in which politicians/media/public relationships are conceptualized at the moment are rather simplistic. They can involve various ‘axes’. Kees Brants and Katrin Voltmer (2011a), for instance, explain how the development of communication technologies affects both the horizontal dimension (politicians-journalists relation) and the vertical dimension (political actors-public relation) of the mediatization of politics. This framework, which the authors develop through an international comparative per-spective, is more sophisticated and holistic than previous explanations of politicians-media, public-media, or politicians-public relation-ships. It also involves the possibility of two-way exchanges among the actors. Crucially, however, it is still based on linear relations within the

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traditional ‘triangle’ whose vertices are constituted by politicians, the media and the public. This book, instead, suggests that around every single individual there are whole overlapping clouds or constellations of relationships, which exist at different levels and which constantly change over time. It is these relationships – their scope, the identity of the actors involved, their changing action – that shape the impact that communi-cation technologies have on political processes at every given time and space. This, in turn, introduces my next point.

No universal generalizations can be made. The way communication technologies are appropriated by each single social actor, including poli-ticians, depends on the set of relationships in which they are enmeshed. Such relationships will shape not only the way the technology is utilized by a politician – indeed whether a politician will utilize it at all – but also the extent to which self-image is important to a politician’s commu-nication activities and what form the latter will take in practice. In this respect the position of each actor – and the relative outcome in terms of the role of self-presentation – is unique. The analysis has pointed out some trends and similarities among the interviewees, but has also underlined how every single representative’s background, personal his-tory and position within a country’s political landscape lead to countless nuances and differentiation.

There is no “real self ” as separate from the “staged self ”. Identity is shaped by an individual’s constellation of relationships. In this study I have shown that the scope of these relationships is affected by communica-tion technologies, including outreach through websites and television appearances, for instance, as well as personal contacts. The experiences of the interviewees show a range of constellations of relationships lead-ing to different outcomes in terms of attention towards self-presentation as well as personal image planning and orchestration (or lack of it). Party leaders’ image might well be staged, but this is not some kind of “lying” to the public. It is the outcome of where political leaders stand in the party network, particularly the fact that they fulfil the role of the “public face” of the party.

Image (or self-representation) is essential to all social life, not just to politi-cians. Politicians are, in this respect, really no different from ordinary people. We all care about first impressions. What applies to highly visible political actors, in principle, is not different from what celebrities or VIPs experience, from Richard Branson to the Pope. What changes is the audience to which each actor plays. The public could be constituted

Mediatization of Politics

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by the fellow citizens in Clusane (fraction of Iseo with about 1,700 inhabitants)1 in the case of one of the consiglieri comunali in Iseo or the 15,000,000 citizens living in the Italy’s North Western constituency (in the case of Italian MEPs).

It is not the impact of the media per se. Politicians are part of networks of relationships exactly like any other social actor. Communication tech-nologies affect the scope of these networks. As such, communication platforms do not produce any change in political processes through their mere existence and availability – which would be rather technologically deterministic – but their effects change across contexts depending on how they are appropriated by social actors, not only politicians but also journalists and members of the public. As shown, the extent to which political representatives located at different levels of distance from their constituents use these platforms (in the form of websites or Facebook pages, for instance) is shaped by broader aspects like visibility in the national and local media and electoral laws. In turn, as suggested by the interviewees’ experiences, the interest in a politician by national or local media is affected by the position of a party within a country’s political spectrum, specific events, whether a party is in government or in opposition.

The ‘personalization’ of politics is a network outcome. The extent to which aspects of personal life become politicized, in this perspective, is simply the result of the expansion of the scope of the network in which a politi-cal actor is entangled. Party leaders are located within the widest constel-lation of relationships. This dramatically increases their visibility – that is, the amount of media attention and extent to which, in practice, they are in front of the camera lens. In turn, this affects the degree to which a politician’s private life becomes part of his/her personal image.2

The public is neither passive nor gullible. The results of the study dismiss the notion that the ‘initiative’ in the political process rests with politi-cians, who increasingly and aggressively take up the public stage to per-form their stunts in front of a passive public (Manin 1997: 223; Mancini 2011: 14). In reality, as political identity is shaped by social relationships, the public is constantly involved in the construction of the self-image of politicians. Political actors do not have the upper hand. On the contrary, like any other social actor, they are incessantly negotiating the way they present themselves, balancing the influences of their personal and profes-sional backgrounds, of their personal taste and individual character with the expected “reading” of their appearance and outfits by the onlookers

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in each of the social situations they come across. Beyond this, as several interviewees have pointed out, the public can tell who is really passionate about serving a community. As a consigliere comunale in Brescia for the civic list Brescia per Passione [Brescia out of Passion] phrases it:

Image has a role, an important one. But I believe that citizens, the electors, have matured and grown up in this respect. They do not let themselves be fooled. In the sense that a good image sold at the last minute does not fool anybody anymore. In my view, image today is something a person builds up over time. It is not immediacy. It is not enough to have a good picture on a poster.

Notes

Istat (2001). For a study of the role of private lives in political communication in Western democracies see Stanyer (2012).

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6Conclusions

Abstract: As a conclusion of the analysis, this chapter points out that the way the role of self-presentation in politics is explained by current studies only applies to the proverbial tip of the political iceberg. This is due not only to the paucity of comparative research but also to the lack of an appropriate ontological scaffolding to make sense of it.

Keywords: comparative research; ontology; research design


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The results of the study presented in the book have shown the utility of a new relational framework to explain the role of personal image in con-temporary politics. The framework conceives the political universe as a social terrain characterized by overlapping constellations of relationships among members of the public, journalists and political actors in their many identities. These relations exist at different levels and seamlessly span the local, national and supranational levels of analysis.

The framework allows rejecting the notion of a ‘mediatization’ of politics, particularly when this concept refers to politics becoming increasingly focused on appearance at the expense of substance. To start with, as demonstrated by the interviewees across two countries, while it is true that presentation is of paramount importance for party leaders – the almost exclusive object of analysis of current studies – this does not appear to apply anywhere near to the same extent to the great majority of other politicians. Second, concern for one’s self-presentation, even for party leaders, is not some kind of aberration or degeneration of politics. It is simply the relational outcome of the increasing scope of the networks of relationships of which those political actors are part – a development brought about by the ubiquity of communication in contemporary societies.

The findings demonstrate that current studies really only apply to the proverbial tip of the political iceberg. If we look at the submerged dimen-sion of politics, in its local and supranational dimensions, it is possible to realize that what most existing research argues, although not incorrect, is insufficient to make sense of the political reality beyond the most vis-ible political figures at election times. In this respect the study shows the analytical benefits of bringing the “everyday” and the “individual” back into the study of political communication.

These insights were enabled by the study’s comparative research design but also, and most importantly, by the adoption of a different ontologi-cal scaffolding than the mostly structure-oriented perspective currently prevailing in Political Communication. The new suggested framework approaches social and political reality in relational terms, combining both the micro (individual agency) and the macro (structural) dimensions. Indeed, these dimensions are entirely overcome by the understanding of all social reality as based on constellations of networks at any single point and moment in time. The analysis presented here is my first step towards the further future development of a two-pronged research

Conclusions

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agenda, which brings together comparative empirical analysis with a relational approach to political processes.

The book ultimately shows that the moralistic stand about the sup-posed deleterious effect of appearances on democratic politics – with the relative dismissal of politicians as liars and the public as passive and ignorant consumers of glossy images – is the outcome of a very selec-tive and, ultimately, shortsighted view of politics. This view reflects the narrowness of academic enquiry and the legacy of outdated models of politics-media relationships – linear politicians-media-public links. The reality of contemporary politics, instead, as the myriad different experi-ences that have been analysed confirm, is much vaster, more nuanced and more variegated.

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Appendix

This is a sample of the questions asked during the semi-structured interviews. The questions below refer to the role of local councillor.

Interview questions

Background

How/why did you get into politics?Why did you join the party/political group you represent?How do you see your role as a councillor? What do you do?How long have you been a councillor?How old are you?

Presentation

I am sure all councillors want their constituents to know that they are “here to help” and “there to look after local residents’ interests”, but is there something that you especially want to communicate to your constituents? For example, would you want your constituents to understand that you are particularly trustworthy, or organized and professional, or approachable rather than committed to ideas?Do you have any contacts with your constituents (through surgeries, for instance)?How do you present yourself when you meet them? (formally/informally)What does the way you present yourself tell about you as a person?

Appendix

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What does the way you present yourself tell about you as a politician ?Would you say that the way you present yourself reflects the values of your party/political group? If so, why/how? If not, why not?Did you ever receive any training or consultancy support on how to present yourself (not only about the way you look but also in terms of presentation skills, public speaking, voice coaching ...)?Did you ever receive any recommendations from your party/political group in relation to personal presentation?

Your presentation

Are there different “looks” or “styles” in your presentation that you use in different circumstances (for instance attending a meeting at the Civic Hall rather than meeting your constituents at a local market)? Could you give some examples of these looks and the kind of events to which they would apply?What affects your choice of a style rather than another (for example, formal attire rather than casual)? For instance, would you think about comfort or kind of activities you are going to engage with?Is there some piece of clothing that you tend to wear more often? If so, why?Is there an accessory you tend to wear more often? If so, why?Is there a colour you tend to wear more often? If so, why?Does your way of presenting yourself change depending on whether cameras/journalists are going to be at the event you are attending? If so, how/why?Do you often have contacts with journalists/media?

Your constituents

Who are your constituents? What is their typical profile, if any?What would they talk to you about? What are the issues that are most often raised during your surgeries?

Changes over time

Do you find the way you present yourself has changed over time? If so, why/how? If not, why not?Do you think presentation has become more important? If so, why/how? If not, why not?Are national-level politicians more dependent on their image than local councillors?

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Archetti, Cristina, 18art, role of in politics, 2‘audience democracy’, 15–16Azarian, Gholam Reza, 32

Baines, Paul R., 2Banducci, Susan A., 13Barnard, Malcolm, 2Barthes, Roland, 2Bearman, Peter S., 31Belpoliti, Marco, 17, 25Bennet, W. Lance, 13, 14Berlusconi, Silvio, 4, 16, 25, 73Betts, Kate, 2biparty system, see party

systemBlair, Tony, 4blogs, 19, 24, 29, 35Blumer, Herbert, 37Blumler, Jay G., 11, 15, 16Braben, Donald W., 8Brants, Kees, 12, 17, 83Brescia per Passione, 50, 86Bowman, Nicholas E., 13Brown, Gordon, 4Brown, Robin, 22, 23Butler, Patrick, 13

Calhoun, Craig, 29, 39Cameron, David, 4, 41campaigning, see political

campaigningCampbell, Alastair, 13Cardo, Valentina, 14Center for Responsive Politics, 2Charon, Joel M., 38, 39Cheles, Luciano, 14Chiao, Joan Y., 13

Index

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0012

Index

Chilvers, Simon, 4class, 74, 75–76clothing, 3, 4, 32, 37–38, 44–50, 52–54,

73, 74–76suits, 45, 47, 48, 50, 75, 76, 77, 78ties, 39, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 63, 72–73,

75, 77, 78see also accessories

Cohen, Diana Tracy, 15Coleman, Stephen, 3, 14, 15, 16colour, 3, 14, 53, 63Colour Me Beautiful, 4Collins, Neil, 3, 13Comfort, Max, 8communication, 31, 38, 44, 65, 69, 83, 84communication technology, 3, 7, 10,

12, 22, 24, 30, 32, 34, 35–37, 39, 60, 64–65, 83, 84, 85

see also blogs, Facebook, Internet, newsletters, newspapers, phone, social media, technology, television, Twitter

comparative research, 4, 7, 20, 22, 36–37, 41, 87, 88–89

see also research designcomune, 20, 21, 64, 81Comuni Italiani, 26Conservatives, 20, 41, 57, 61, 77, 80consigliere comunale, 20, 21, 24, 26, 50,

51, 53, 59, 61, 63, 64, 71, 86consiglio comunale, 22, 62, 72

see also local councillorconstituency, size of, 22, 23–24, 26,

41–43, 52, 64–67, 85Conway, Daniel, 8Corner, John, 14Corriere della Sera, 81councillor, see local councillorCrane, Diana, 2Cwalina, Wojciech, 13

de Beus, Jos, 10, 15, 16de Chernatony, 13De Landtsheer, Christ’l, 3, 13democracy

‘audience democracy’, 15–16

decay of, 3, 5, 10, 13, 15–16, 36–37, 50, 65, see also appearance, as opposed to ‘substance’

De Rosa, Daniela, 67de Vries, Philippe, 3, 13Delli Carpini, Michael X., 83dress, see dressing code; clothingDorbani, Malika Bouabdellah, 7dressing code, 2, 32, 43, 72, 74–78

Elder, Miriam, 4electoral law, 25, 67, 85electoral system, 17, 21–22, 41, 51–52,

65, 73–74first-past-the-post, 21, 52proportional, 21–22

Emirbayer, Mustafa, 33everyday, dimension of politics, 5, 7, 16,

17, 43, 69, 70, 88

Facebook, 4, 19, 34, 35, 56, 67–68, 85Falkowski, Andrzej, 13fashion, 2, 3, 11, 78female politicians, see women

politiciansFenno, Richard F., 14, 19Follett, Barbara, 4, 53Fox, Imogen, 4Franklin, Bob, 3French, Alan, 13

Gaber, Ivor, 13Ghandi, Mahatma, 2Gill, Harleen, 13Goffman, Erving, 5, 39Gonsalves, Peter, 2Grattan, Michelle, 13Gross, Doug, 4guerrilla research, 5–6, 8Gulati, Girish, 15, 24

hairstyle, 3, 54, 57–58Hallin, Daniel C., 27, 37Harris, Phil, 13Hay, Colin, 29Heller, Steven, 2

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0012

Index

Henneberg, Stephan C., 13‘home style’, 14, 19Hopkin, Jonathan, 20Horton, Donald, 39Hoskins, Andrew, 7hypothesis, 6–7, 20–26, 42–43, 51–52,

58, 64–65, 69

identity,construction of, 5, 14, 17, 30–32,

33–35, 36, 43, 74individual, 10, 26, 29–30, 30–32, 33,

35, 37–39, 84of a politician, 4, 5, 15, 17, 26,43,

74–79, 83, 84, 85‘identity politics’, 11ideology, 11, 16image,

consultants, 2, 3, 4, 7–8, 11, 50–56management, 43, 50–58, see also

appearance, cultivation ofpersonal, see self-presentationrole of in electoral preferences, 13,

20, 22role of in politics, 3, 5, 20, 29,

37, 48–49, 74, see also political communication, visual aspects

see also appearanceindividual, role in politics, 5, 11, 17, 20,

25, 29, 31, 33, 37–38, 41–42, 74–75, 77, 83, 84, 85, 88

‘individualization’, of politics, 11Internet, 8, 14, 15, 17, 22, 24, 31, 32, 35,

36, 41, 59, 68, see also Facebook; social media; Twitter; websites

interviews, 5–6, 19–20, 22, 24, 26Istat, 86

jewellery, see accessoriesJones, Nick, 13journalists, 39, 59, 62–63, 83 85, 88

Kaid, Linda Lee, 13Kavanagh, Dennis, 11Keenan, William J. F., 2Kotzaivazoglou, I., 14

Kuik, Anke, 3, 14Kurtz, Howard, 13

Labour, 4, 20, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 60, 61, 69, 71, 75, 76, 78, 80

Latour, Bruno, 33, 34, 36, 37Law, John, 33Lawson, Chappell, 13Leeds Council, 26Lees-Marshment, Jennifer, 13Lega Nord, 52, 61, 63–64, 81Letts, Quentin, 4Liberal Democrats, 20, 41, 63‘lifestyle politics’, 16local councillor, 17, 19–20, 21, 24, 26,

29, 34, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 57, 60, 63, 68, 70, 75, 76, 79, see also consigliere comunale

local media, 24, 61–64, 85local politician, see local councillorLock, Andrew, 13Luhmann, Niklas, 83

Machiavelli, Niccoló, 25macro factors, 10, 26, 31, 41, 88

see also structuremake-up, 4, 45Mahler, Julianne, 15Mancini, Paolo, 3, 4, 11, 12, 16, 25, 37, 85Manin, Bernard, 13, 15, 16, 85mass media, 10, 12material culture, 2Mazzoleni, Gianpietro, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13,

14, 15meaning, 7, 10, 13, 25, 63

construction of, 5, 30, 37media, see media coverage; see also

communication technologymedia coverage, 4, 7, 14, 17, 22–23,

24, 36, 39, 41, 51, 52, 60–64, 65, 70, 83, see also newspapers; local media

media management, 3, 4, 7, 13, 22–23, 57, 59

media-politics relationship, see politics-media relationship

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0012

Index

media system, 17, 22–23, 26, 27, 41, 43, 59–64

mediatization of politics, 1–7, 10–13, 17, 20, 22, 35, 41–43, 51, 59, 74, 83–86, 88

Member of Parliament (MP), 19, 26, 34, 39, 44, 52, 60, 71

Member of the European parliament (MEP), 5, 17, 19, 24, 26, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 80, 85

method, see methodologymethodology, 6, 8, 17, 20–21, 33

see also interviewsmodernization, of politics, 11Moloney, Kevin, 14Moss, Hillary, 25multiparty system, see party system

Napoleon, 2, 7Negrine, Ralph, 2New Labour, 2, 3newsletters, 34, 66, 67newspapers, 4, 24, 60–61, 62, 68Nord, Lars W., 26

Office for National Statistics, 26ontology, 7, 17, 26, 29–30, 41, 87O’Cass, Aron, 3, 13O’Loughlin, Ben, 7O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas J., 13

Papathanassopoulos, Stylianos, 2‘parasocial relationships’, 39

see also relationships, indirectParlamento Italiano, 27Partito Democratico, 52, 56, 60, 65, 71party

leaders, 2, 4, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 23, 41, 43, 57, 59, 60, 61, 84, 85, 88

structures, 11–12party system, 17, 20–21, 26, 41, 43,

51–52biparty, 20, 23, 51, 59multiparty, 20, 23, 27, 51, 59see also political system

Pels, Dick, 14personal contact, 17, 20, 24, 25, 29, 32,

41, 51, 65, 68, 69–70, 83, 84see also relationships

personal image, see self-presentationpersonalization, of politics, 12, 20,

51, 85phone, 32, 35, 59Plasser, Fritz, 2plastic surgery, 4political campaigning, 2, 3, 4, 7–8,

12–13, 14, 23, 25, 26, 57–58, 68political communication

as a field of study, 3, 4, 5, 10–17, 41, 51, 60

as a process, 2, 3, 10–13, 22, 65–67, 87visual aspects of, 3, 4, 5, 10, 13, 15,

25, 30political consultants, 7, 8, 11, 52, 55, 57

see also image, consultantspolitical culture, 17, 22, 24–26, 27, 41,

43, 71–73political identity, see identity, of a

politicianpolitical leaders, see party, leaderspolitical marketing, 3, 7, 13, 14, 16,

26–27, 62political system, 22, 25, 26, 43

see also party systempolitical spin, see media managementpolitical style, 14

see also ‘home style’politicians, local, 5, 19 see also local

councillor; consigliere comunalesee Member of Parliament (MP)see Member of the European

Parliament (MEP)see also women politicians

politics–media, relationship, 5, 82–84, 89

Popolo della Libertà, 50, 54, 64, 67, 72, 80, 81

popular culture, 3, 14, 25Portanova, Mario, 67presentation, see self-presentation

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0012

Index

professionalism, of politicians, 42, 44–47, 73–74, 76–78, 85

professionalization, of politics, 3, 11–12, 26, 41

propaganda, 2public, 3, 4, 5, 14, 15–16, 22, 23, 39, 48,

58, 59, 65, 68, 71, 83–86, 88–89Putin, Vladimir, 4Pye, Lucian W., 25

qualitative research, 19see also interviews

Regan, Priscilla M., 15Reisinger, William M., 25relational sociology, 5, 29–30, 30–32, 33relationships, 7, 20, 22, 29–30, 31, 32,

35–36, 38–39, 41, 43, 68, 71, 74, 83–85, 88–89

direct, see personal contactindirect, 29, 39, 68, 69–71

research design, 6, 19–20, 36–37, 41, 88–89

see also comparative research

Santorum, Rick, 4Scammell, Margaret, 8, 14, 16Scheucher, Christian, 2Schneider, Helmut, 13Schröder, Gerhard, 4Schulz, Winfried, 3, 10, 11, 12, 15self-image, see self-presentationself-presentation, 1–7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17,

37–39, see also imagerole of age in, 42, 54, 72–73, 76–79role of class in, see class

Sfardini, Anna, 3, 14Sigelman, Carol K., 13social networks, 30, 31, 33–35, 36–37,

38–39, 41–42, 43, 65, 68–71, 83, 84, 85, 88

symbolic interactionism, 5, 29–30, 37–39

Simons, Jon, 14Smith, Gareth, 3, 13

social media, 17, 22, 24, 32, 59, see also Facebook; Twitter

social ontology, see ontologysocial relationships, see relationshipsspin, see media managementSponza, Lucio, 14Squires, Nick, 25Stanyer, James, 15, 20, 36, 86Stelzer, Cita, 2Stovel, Katherine, 31Street, John, 14Strömbäck, Jesper, 3, 15, 17, 26structure (in structure-agency debate),

10, 17see also macro factorssee also party, structures

Stuntz-Tresky, Margaret, 13, 14style,

of dress, 2see also political stylesee also dressing code

Summers, Deborah, 4symbolic interactionism, 5, 29–30,

37–39

technology, 32–35, 84see also communication technology

telephone, see phonetelevision, 12, 14, 15, 17, 22, 25, 29,

36, 42, 47, 56, 61, 65, 67–68, 74, 84

Thatcher, Margaret, 2–3Turner, Jann, 4Twitter, 19, 56, 67Tymoshenko, Yulia, 3

UK Treasury Department, 24Unger, Ross, 6, 8

van Biezen, Ingrid, 20van Zoonen, Lisbeth, 3, 14variable, 20–26, 41–43, 51, 52, 59, 65,

74, 79Verba, Sidney, 25, 27Vertessen, Dieter, 3, 13

DOI: 10.1057/9781137353429.0012

Index

visuality, see political communication, visual aspects

Voltmer, Katrin, 12, 17, 83

Wallis, James Harold, 14Ward, Janelle, 16Warfel, Todd Zaki, 6, 8websites, 15, 19, 24, 29, 34–35, 56, 66,

84, 85White, Harrison C., 31, 32, 35, 37, 38

White, Jon, 13Williams, Bruce A., 83Wilson, Richard W., 24, 25Winfield, Betty Houchin, 8Wohl, R. Richard, 39women politicians, 2–3, 4, 8Woolgar, Steve, 33

Yannas, Prodromos, 2Young, Robb, 2, 3

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