Politicians have started to use social media more often. As such media induce personal campaigning, one might expect more personalization to follow. We explore what type of personalization social media stimulate, whether this is different for Twitter and Facebook and analyze the role of parties. We make use of quantitative and qualitative data about the Netherlands (2010-2014). We find that while theoretically the impact of social media may be big, in practice it is fairly limited: more presidentialization but not more individualization (though Twitter might increase the focus on other candidates slightly). The difference between theory and practice seems largely due to the parties. They adopt a very ambiguous stance: though they often stimulate candidates to use social media, they want to keep control nonetheless.

This article is one of the first to systematically examine parties’ use of YouTube in Dutch election campaigns and to consider its effects. Content analysis of 406 YouTube ads and additional research show that nine political parties made use of this new campaign instrument in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign. However, unlike U.S. presidential candidate Obama, the parties did not really use YouTube to mobilize and involve voters. Instead, YouTube was used only as a means to broadcast advertisements for the party. These ads only reached a small audience and had little influence online as well as in the print media. Furthermore, this study examines which of these ads were more likely to reach a large number of viewers. The results demonstrate that short, comparative ads that contain the party leader, that are uploaded early on in the campaign, that stem from small or winning parties and that have numerous links on external websites are likely to reach more viewers.

This study analyses the news coverage of female politicians in Flanders (Belgium). We investigate whether the deficiency of media attention for female politicians is due to structural factors or whether the news media themselves create a gender bias. For this purpose, we examine eleven possible explanations for the gender bias. On one hand the characteristics of the politicians, such as their function, can influence their news exposure and on the other hand the features of the news media, such as the broadcasting station, can be of importance. Overall, our evidence suggests that mainly the function determines the news exposure of female politicians and not their gender. Nevertheless, female politicians still get less speaking time, even when controlling for all other variables. We can conclude that a real gender bias exists in the Flemish television news: journalists and editors give significantly less attention to female politicians compared to their male colleagues.