The personalisation of politics is the idea that leaders increasingly overshadow their parties, and social media might be expected to speed that up. So I compared how much Facebook engagement leaders’ pages get with how much their parties’ pages get.

The paper
Leader or Party? How Facebook Engagement Divided between European Party Leaders and Their Parties, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I looked at 53 leader and party pairs from 44 parties in 11 European countries between 2010 and 2020, using posts collected through CrowdTangle, Meta’s former tool for tracking public Facebook pages. A leader’s page only counts while that person actually led the party.

What I found

On average, leaders’ pages received 43% of the combined engagement of leader and party, while making about a third of the posts. The median leader’s post drew about 1.8 times as much as the party’s. The split varied enormously. Some leaders took less than a fifth of the engagement, such as Christian Levrat of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland. Others took more than four fifths, such as Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Leaders of larger parties took a larger share.

The thing the personalisation story predicts is a rising trend, and I did not find one. Comparing the same leader and party over time, the leader’s share did not rise, and a rise of more than about six points over the decade can be ruled out. During election campaigns, leaders posted somewhat more and the gap in engagement per post narrowed.

On Facebook, leaders were often the main draw, but the balance between leader and party was a persistent feature of each party, with no sign of a rising trend.

Caveats

This covers 53 pairs in 11 countries, and only pages that exist in my data. Engagement is attention, not support. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

The views in this post and the paper are my own.