The Personal in the Political on Twitter: Towards a Typology of Politicians’ Personalized Tweeting Behaviours

The concept of personalization has increasingly become central to our understanding of political communication especially during election time. With the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter, which places more focus on individual politicians and opens up more direct links with voters, the opportunities for more personalized campaigning have been expanded. Although studies of personalization in politics and online campaigning have been popular avenues of research in the last 20 years, an empirically driven understanding of the nexus between the two is still underdeveloped. In this chapter, through an analysis of the ‘personal’ tweeting behaviours of British and Dutch candidates in the 2010 general election campaigns, we attempt to understand how politicians disclose aspects of their private life through social media: which aspects these are and how they are intermingled with the ‘political’.