Faces of Europe : structural drivers of visual personalization in political parties’ Facebook campaigns

Abstract

Social media platforms have become central arenas for election campaigning, pushing political actors to adapt to their attention‐driven logics. One prominent strategy is visual personalization, reflecting the platforms’ person‐centered, image‐driven design. This study offers the first large‐scale, cross‐national analysis of how political parties across 23 EU countries strategically employed two dimensions of visual personalization—individualization and privatization—on Facebook during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign. It examines how their digital campaign output was shaped by two party‐level factors (populist vs. non‐populist status; government vs. opposition) and two country‐level factors (electoral systems; degree of authoritarianism). Based on a manual content analysis of 14,553 posts, we find that individualization was far more common than privatization and that party‐level characteristics exerted stronger influence than country‐level contexts. Populist and governing parties used more individualization. Privatization was more prevalent among non‐populist parties and in more liberal environments. These findings challenge assumptions about populist and authoritarian communication styles and make a theoretical contribution by demonstrating that visual personalization is a multidimensional phenomenon whose specific dimensions respond differently to structural incentives. Our results underscore the need to analytically separate individualization and privatization and to account for their distinct contextual drivers when assessing political personalization in digital environments.