Abstract
Media Personalization during European Elections: the 2019 Election Campaigns in Context<sup>*</sup>
Highlights
The European Parliament (EP) placed great hopes in the Spitzenkandidaten procedure, which was first employed in the 2014 European elections and entails that European party families nominate pan‐European lead candidates for the president of the European Commission (EC)
The average values for English and French MEPs in their respective newspapers are lowest of all. This may be an indicator of electoral system differences as these MEPs, as well as Polish MEPs, are elected via closed party lists, while media system differences may not play a crucial role compared with the personalization of the EC (Gattermann, 2018)
The aim of the Spitzenkandidaten procedure was to raise voter awareness and participation. Evidence suggests that their impact on electoral behaviour has been rather mixed (Gattermann and Marquart, 2020; Schmitt et al, 2015). The purpose of this contribution was to study this phenomenon against the backdrop of mediated personalization processes during EP elections
Summary
The European Parliament (EP) placed great hopes in the Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidates) procedure, which was first employed in the 2014 European elections and entails that European party families nominate pan‐European lead candidates for the president of the European Commission (EC). The election of Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president in 2019 led to the provisional abandonment of the procedure and casted doubt on the impact of the procedure on European Union (EU) politics in the long run Many of these concerns address inter‐institutional relations (see Hobolt, 2014), low levels of recognising lead candidates (Gattermann and de Vreese, 2020; Hobolt, 2014) as well as their limited potential for mobilization (Schmitt et al, 2015; Gattermann and Marquart, 2020) indicate that the Spitzenkandidaten have not yet fully resonated with European citizens. The findings indicate that EP election coverage generally does not become more personalized over time This holds for attention given to Spitzenkandidaten between 2014 and 2019, they are often more visible than a typical MEP from the same party family. I briefly discuss the implications of these findings
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