The Personalisation of Politics in the UK: Mediated Leadership from Attlee to Cameron

What does it mean to say that modern politics is personalised? To what extent is it more personalised than in the past, what is distinctive about contemporary forms of personalisation and are these changes enduring? This book addresses these questions. It re-thinks the concept of personalisation and develops an analytical framework for its study, in the process challenging current theorisation and bridging the political science and media studies approaches to the subject. Moreover, it presents new, rich and rigorous empirical data about how personalisation has developed in the UK, from 1945 to 2009. The analysis reveals a complex picture, which challenges both those who see personalisation as a pervasive and escalating phenomenon and those who can see almost no change at all. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that what is most distinctive about contemporary personalisation is not a general emphasis on leaders but a heightened attention to their personal lives and qualities, which is defined as the politicisation of private persona. The book moves beyond the particulars of the British case to examine how personalisation affects politics for good or ill. Avoiding both the hyper-rationalist view of politics and cultural populism, it demonstrates that the emphasis on the personal is neither intrinsically wrong nor a democratic panacea. Its conceptual depth and empirical range makes the book a must-read for anyone researching the phenomenon of personalisation internationally, and a benchmark for future studies. It is also highly accessible to undergraduate and graduate students in political communication, British politics and media studies.