The Social Media Politicians: Personalisation, Authenticity, and Memes

Personalisation As A Feature Of “New” Politics

Political personalisation has been perceived as one of the fundamental characteristics of the so-called contemporary politics (Agranoff, 1974; Castells, 2009; Maarek, 2011), in line with other aspects such as the growing relevance of media—especially related to television—the simplification of political discourse, social fragmentation (Bennett, 2012) or partisan dealignment (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000). Regarding the latter, there is no lack of examples in which the evolution of certain political organisations has been linked to the trajectory of their leaders, such as Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi or En Marche and Emmanuel Macron (Pedersen & Rahat, 2019), to the point of finding parties that bear the name of their leader in their names, such as the Italian Noi con Salvini or the GIL, acronym of Independent Liberal Group (Grupo Independiente Liberal in Spanish), founded by Jesús Gil y Gil. In the face of this, Daoust, Blais and Péloquin-Skulski (2019) found, however, that despite declining membership or laxity in party loyalty, parties remain more important than leaders. After all, parties become more stable than their members, which invites easier and more lasting identification with the electorate. In this way, it would be expected that loyal voters would cast their votes according to the political party, while those more fickle voters would pay more attention to the candidate or the programme; although it is true that in such decision making, each country’s election system plays a role (Canel, 2006), as well as the personal preference of each voter (Rospir, 1999). In this way and facing the impossibility of drawing a reliable conclusion based on the variables involved, the most suitable strategy to follow seems to be for the candidate, the political party and the programme to integrate coherently and consistently with the electoral message.