Popularisering en personalisering in politieke communicatie

Debate about the infl uence of the media, and in particular television, on the quality and viability of democracy and public debate has led to a variety of academic, political and journalistic publications. In this paper we analyze the diverse phenomena that authors have brought together under widely used terms such as ‘video malaise’, ‘tabloidization and ‘media logic’, in order to develop more precise concepts to assess the contribution of current forms of communication to political and democratic processes. Introducing two new conceptualizations, through a bottomup, one-by-one comparison of publications, we
found that popularization pertains to topical, narrative, audiovisual and participatory features
of political television programs. Personalization includes the distinct but related processes of individualization, privatization and emotionalization of the coverage of individual politicians.Popularization and personalization are concepts that can be used for the analysis of political communication without taking an a priori, normative position of television as either dumbing down the political process or providing new potential for a more inclusive political process.