Exposing themselves? The personalization of tweeting behavior during the 2012 Dutch general election campaign

The concept of personalization has increasingly become central to our understanding of political communication, particularly during election time. With the rise of social media 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-led understanding of the nexus between the two is still underdeveloped, at least with respect to Twitter. In this paper, through an analysis of the ‘personal’ tweeting behaviors of Dutch candidates in the 2012 general election, we therefore attempt to understand how politicians in an advanced Western democracy attempt to disclose aspects of the private life through social media – which aspects these are and how they are intermingled with the ‘political’.