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DOI: 10.1177/0267323112464837
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2013 28: 53 originally published online 1 JanuaryEuropean Journal of Communication
Sanne Kruikemeier, Guda van Noort, Rens Vliegenthart and Claes H de Vreese
communication
Getting closer: The effects of personalized and interactive online political
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European Journal of Communication
28(1) 53­–66
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DOI: 10.1177/0267323112464837
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Getting closer: The effects of
personalized and interactive
online political communication
Sanne Kruikemeier, Guda van Noort,
Rens Vliegenthart and Claes H de Vreese
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Political parties and politicians increasingly use the possibilities of the Internet to communicate
interactively with citizens and vice versa. The Internet also offers opportunities for individual
politicians to profile themselves. These developments are often said to bring politics closer
to citizens, increasing their political engagement in politics. Empirical evidence for such claims
is, however, scarce. In a scenario experiment and a laboratory experiment using real-world
websites, the authors examine whether more personalized online communication (a focus on
individual politicians) and the use of interactive features increase political involvement among
citizens. The results from both studies demonstrate that both highly interactive and personalized
online communication do increase citizens’ political involvement. Moreover, it was also found that
political personalization positively moderates the effect of interactivity on political involvement,
meaning that the effects of interactivity are even stronger in a personalized setting.
Keywords
Experiment, interactivity, Internet, personalization, political involvement
Political parties and elected representatives increasingly use the possibilities of the
Internet to communicate interactively with citizens and party members about their plans,
points of view and daily business (e.g. Druckman et al., 2007; Kenski and Stroud, 2006).
For citizens, the Internet offers easy access to political information, providing all kinds
of opportunities to participate in political debates.
The Internet not only enables interactive communication between political parties and
citizens, but social media such as Facebook and Twitter, also offer opportunities for
Corresponding author:
Sanne Kruikemeier, Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR, University of Amsterdam,
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: s.kruikemeier@uva.nl
464837EJC28110.1177/0267323112464837European Journal of CommunicationKruikemeier et al.
2013
Article
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54	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
individual politicians to profile themselves. According to Van Santen and Van Zoonen
(2010), the rapidly growing number of politicians using new online communication
instruments could be seen as a form of ‘personalization’ – the shift of attention from
political parties to politicians, especially since these new media technologies are designed
to facilitate direct communication between politicians, not parties, and citizens.
It has been claimed that online political communication (that facilitates interactive
and personalized communication), may increase citizens’ political engagement, by
bringing politics closer to citizens (e.g. De Vreese, 2007; Tolbert and McNeal, 2003).
There is, however, little empirical evidence for these claims (Boulianne, 2009). Hence,
it remains unclear whether personalization and the use of specific interactive features
should be part of an effective digital political communication strategy. Our study aims
to tackle this uncertainty and contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First,
most of the work on online political communication has been devoted to the effect of
political Internet use in general (e.g. Kenski and Stroud, 2006; Shah et al., 2005) and not
to the effects of specific characteristics of new media. Our study instead investigates the
effects of two specific characteristics: interactive and personalized communication.
Second, to date, the literature on political personalization has rarely addressed the consequences
of personalization, especially in online communication. Third, previous studies
have not yet examined the combined impact of personalization and interactivity on
citizens’ political involvement. The central question in this article is: To what extent do
levels of political personalization and interactivity of online communication increase
political involvement among citizens?
To answer this question, we conducted two experiments. In the first experiment we
use data from a survey-embedded scenario experiment, which we distributed to a representative
sample of the Dutch population. The second experiment replicates and extends
the findings in the first experiment, by using a laboratory experiment with real-world
websites, different research population and extended measures.
Interactivity and personalization in online political
communication
The notion of interactivity is widely used in various disciplines, including political
communication. It suffers, however, from conceptual confusion and contradictions.
The different understandings have in common that they assume two-way communication,
which is also how we will define interactivity in this study. Research about the consequences
of interactivity mostly finds positive effects on individual level political variables,
such as more positive evaluations of candidates (Sundar et al., 2003) and a
heightened sense of political efficacy (Tedesco, 2007). In line with these arguments,
we hypothesize that high interactive online political communication has a positive
effect on citizens’ political involvement (H1).
Personalization suffers from similarly diverging conceptualizations (Van Santen and
Van Zoonen, 2010), with the common denominator being that personalization involves a
shift in public attention from political institutions and parties, to politicians and their
individual competences, private lives and emotional reflections (sometimes referred to
as political privatization; Adam and Maier, 2010; Rahat and Sheafer, 2007; Van Santen
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Kruikemeier et al.	 55
and Van Zoonen, 2010). Personalization might take place especially in new media channels:
the specific features used in new and social media ‘are designed to facilitate a direct link
between sender (politician) and receiver (citizen), and vice versa’ (Van Santen and Van
Zoonen, 2010: 65), which consequently puts individual politicians more to the forefront.
Only a few studies have addressed the consequences of political personalization and
found positive effects, including increased effectiveness of messages (for an overview,
see Brettschneider, 2008), identification with politicians (Langer, 2007) and possibly
electoral turnout (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 2001; Rosenberg et al., 1986). By taking these
outcomes as a starting point, we propose that personalized online political communication
has a positive effect on citizens’ political involvement (H2).
Finally, if interactivity and personalization are combined in online political communication,
it is likely that possible positive effects may even be stronger. This expectation
is based on the Social Presence Theory (Short et al., 1976; Tanis, 2003). Social
presence increases when a medium (or its features) resembles interpersonal communication
(Fortin and Dholakia, 2005; Tanis, 2003). Since interactive and personalized
communication closely resemble interpersonal communication (because it enables
two-way communication and the communication exchange becomes ‘personal’), the
perception of ‘social presence’ of the politician will be even stronger, than in the solely
interactive or only personalized case (Short et al., 1976; Tanis, 2003). Hence, we
assume that a positive effect of high interactive online political communication on
citizens’ political involvement is stronger when the online political communication is
also personalized, and vice versa (H3).
To test our three hypotheses, we conducted a real-life, scenario-based surveyembedded
experiment (Study 1) and a laboratory experiment with real-world websites
as stimuli (Study 2).
Study 1: Design, measures and outcomes
In the first experiment, we designed a survey in which we offered the respondents a scenario
about a fictitious political website, which we manipulated in terms of content and
level of interactivity. We created four scenarios on the basis of high–low interactivity and
high–low personalization (see Figure A1 in Appendix). In the high interactive condition,
the scenario described a website of a party that actually exists (the social-liberal party
D66, a small size, centre political party in the Netherlands), and which contained features
that enable two-way communication and facilitate control over the communication process,
whereas in the low interactivity condition features were described that only allow
for one-way communication, and do not allow for control (based upon Liu and Shrum,
2002; Voorveld et al., 2010). In the high personalization scenario the focus of the website
was on individual competence and private lives, whereas the low personalization scenario
offered information about the organization and history of the political party (based
upon Van Santen and Van Zoonen, 2010). Two pre-tests showed that personalization and
interactivity were effectively manipulated.
Participants from a representative sample of the Dutch population were invited by
email in March 2012. The response rate was 68.4% (calculated according to AAPOR
guidelines; AAPOR, 2011), with 718 people responding (52.8% female, mean age
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56	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
49). After outliers were removed, 650 respondents remained in the sample. After filling
out a questionnaire, they were directed online to one of the four scenarios. Next,
participants were asked to vividly imagine a situation in which they are searching for
political information online, because of an upcoming election.
After reading the scenario, respondents answered questions about political
involvement, particularly about having the opportunity to come in contact with politics
or politicians and their feelings of being close to politics or politicians. ‘Contact’
was measured using two items (i.e. ‘this website offers opportunities for a dialogue’
and ‘this website gives me the opportunity to come into contact with politicians’).
Answers were coded on a seven-point scale (1 = totally disagree, 7 = totally agree;
M = 3.79, SD = 1.33). ‘Closeness’ was also measured by two items (i.e. ‘this website
gives me the feeling that I am closer to politics’ and ‘this website gives me the feeling
that politicians are more involved with their electorate’). Answers were coded on
a seven-point scale (1 = totally disagree, 7 = totally agree; M = 3.46, SD = 1.34). A
confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with varimax rotation showed that the validity
and reliability of our scales were good (details are available upon request from the
authors). Last, we included the control variable likelihood of voting for D66 in our
analyses to test for possible confounds. This was measured by asking participants:
‘How likely is it that you would vote for D66?’Answers were recorded on an 11-point
scale (1 = I would never vote for this party, 11 = I would certainly vote for this party;
M = 5.34, SD =3.29).
The results of the multiple analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) show that there are
effects of interactivity on both the perception of how easy it is to come into contact with
politics, and on feelings of closeness to politics. The difference between high and low
was significant for both indicators. People in the high interactivity condition scored on
average 0.52 points higher on the scale that indicates how easy they consider it to be in
contact with politics and 0.18 points higher for their feelings of closeness to the politics.
Thus, participants in the high interactive condition felt that they had more opportunities
to come in contact with, and felt closer to politics than participants in the low interactive
condition. These results support our first hypothesis.
In terms of the effect of personalization, the results demonstrate that participants in
the personalized condition felt that they had more opportunities to come into contact
with politics (0.40 points higher on the scale) than participants in the non-personalized
condition. However, the results did not reveal an effect of personalization on the sense
of closeness to politics and politicians. Thus, our second hypothesis was only partly
supported.
With regard to the interaction effects of interactivity and personalization on contact
and feelings of closeness, we found a significant interaction between interactivity and
personalization on the contact scale; more specifically, the effect of interactivity was
significant in the personalized scenario, but only marginally significant in the nonpersonalized
condition. Results on the closeness scale show similar results: the effect of
interactivity was significant in the personalized condition but not in the non-personalized
condition. This means that the effects of interactivity on political engagement only occur
in personalized political communication. These results confirm our third hypothesis (see
Table A1 in Appendix).
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Kruikemeier et al.	 57
Study 2: Design, measures and outcomes
In the second study we tested the same hypotheses, by conducting a laboratory experiment
with real-world websites. Participants were 262 undergraduate students (74.4%
female) with a mean age of 21 (SD = 2.61). We manipulated the level of personalization
and interactivity in the same way as in our first study, using the actual website of the
social-liberal party D66 as a basis (a pre-test showed that personalization and interactivity
were effectively manipulated). This resulted again in a 2 (low vs high interactivity) ×
2 (non-personalized vs personalized) between subjects design (see Table A3 and Figure
A2 in Appendix). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four websites and
were asked to evaluate the usability of the site, and to answer questions about political
involvement with the party and the politician. We excluded participants who were familiar
with the real-world website of D66 (7.7%) to reduce method bias.
We measured political involvement by four dependent variables (i.e. contact, closeness,
arousal of political interest and intention to revisit the website). Contact was this
time measured using five items (i.e. ‘this website gives me the opportunity to come into
contact with politicians’, ‘invites people for a conversation’, ‘shows that politicians are
open to ideas from citizens’, ‘gives politics the opportunity to react to ideas from citizens’
and ‘shows that politicians are willing to listen to me’). Answers were coded on a
seven-point scale (1 = totally disagree, 7 = totally agree; M = 3.00, SD = 1.40). Closeness
was measured using four items (i.e. ‘this website reduces the distance between me and
politics’, ‘gives me the feeling that I am closer to politics’, ‘gives me the feeling that
politicians are more involved with their electorate’ and ‘connects people’). Answers
were coded on a seven-point scale (1 = totally disagree, 7 = totally agree; M = 3.42, SD
=1.25). Here too, a confirmatory factor analysis with varimax rotation revealed that
these two scales were reliable and valid (details are available upon request from the
authors). Arousal of political interest was measured using one item (i.e. ‘this website
arouses my interest in politics’). Answers were coded on a seven-point scale (1 = totally
disagree, 7 = totally agree; M = 2.87, SD = 1.31). Intention to revisit website was also
measured using one item (i.e. ‘I have the intention to revisit the website’). Answers were
coded on a seven-point scale (1 = totally disagree, 7 = totally agree; M = 2.04, SD =
1.21). We controlled for three variables that we expected to interfere with the main
effects of interactivity and personalization that we are interested in: likelihood of voting
for D66, affective and cognitive involvement with the website.
The results of our MANCOVA show that there is a significant effect of interactivity
on political involvement, meaning that participants in the high interactive condition felt
that they had more opportunities to come into contact with (on average 2.01 points
higher), felt closer to (1.12 points higher) and had the feeling that the website aroused
their interest in politics (0.57 points higher). However, the results revealed no main
effects of interactivity on the intention to revisit the website. Overall, our first hypothesis
is largely supported.
In terms of the effect of personalization, the results revealed that participants in the
personalized condition felt that they had more opportunities to come into contact with
politics than participants in the non-personalized condition (0.48 points difference).
However, the results did not show an effect on closeness, the arousal of political interest,
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58	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
or intention to revisit the website. Thus, our second hypothesis was only marginally
supported.
We also examined the interaction effects between personalization, interactivity and
the dependent variables (see Table A2 in Appendix). The ANCOVA showed a significant
interaction effect between interactivity and personalization on the various outcome
variables. More specifically, the results reveal that the effects of interactivity are only
significant in the personalized condition for political interest arousal, and intention to
revisit the site. For contact and perceived closeness, the effects of interactivity are significant
for both the personalized and non-personalized conditions, but in both instances
the effect was significantly larger in the personalized condition. Figures 1–4 provide a
graphic representation of the interaction effects. Overall, these results offer support for
our third hypothesis.
1.92 2.11
3.65
4.38
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
non-personalized personalized
engagementinpoliticaldialogues
low interactivity
high interactivity
Figure 1.  Scores on the contact scale as a function of personalization and interactivity.
2.86 2.89
3.65
4.32
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
non-personalized personalized
closenesstowardspolitics
low interactivity
high interactivity
Figure 2.  Scores on the closeness scale as a function of personalization and interactivity.
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Kruikemeier et al.	 59
Discussion
In this article, we studied the effectiveness of personalization and interactivity in online
political communication. We examined whether a focus on an individual politician (vs a
party) and the use of interactive features increase political involvement among citizens. As
expected, both studies show that personalization and interactivity have a positive effect on
citizens’ political involvement. Citizens who visit a website which is more focused on an
individual politician or which contains more interactive features, feel more politically
involved than citizens who visit a website focused on a political party or which did not
contain interactive features. Those results are particularly consistent with earlier studies
which looked at the effects of interactivity (Sundar et al., 2003; Tedesco, 2007) and demonstrated
positive and desirable effects of higher levels of interactivity. Furthermore, in
accordance with our expectation based on the Social Presence Theory (Short et al., 1976;
Tanis, 2003), we also found that the combined effect of personalized, interactive online
political communication has an even stronger positive effect on citizens’involvement than
2.68 2.49
2.92
3.40
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
non-personalized personalized
arousalofinterestinpolitics
low interactivity
high interactivity
Figure 3.  Scores on the arousal of political interest scale as a function of personalization and
interactivity.
2.13
1.62
1.97
2.45
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
non-personalized personalized
intentiontore-visitthewebsite
low interactivity
high interactivity
Figure 4.  Scores on the intention to revisit the website as a function of personalization and
interactivity.
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60	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
when taken separately. More precisely, we observed that interactive, personalized online
communication has a positive effect on citizens’feelings of having the opportunity to come
into contact with politics, and citizens’ feelings of closeness to politics. This implies that it
is effective to combine these two new media strategies. Of course, not all citizens will be
equally influenced. Part of the electorate is likely to be suspicious towards interactivity and
personalization and will consider them marketing tools to convince people, rather than
genuine attempts to strengthen the ties between politics and voters, which may decrease the
persuasive power (Friestad and Wright, 1994).
In Study 2, we additionally found that individuals who report that an interactive, personalized
website arouses their interest in politics and individuals who visited the interactive,
personalized website said more often that they would revisit this website,
compared to citizens who did not visit this website. It seems that besides feelings of
political involvement, personalized and interactive online communication may also exert
positive effects on actual interest in politics and behaviour, which is also supported by
previous evidence (Thorson and Rodgers, 2006). However, it is important to note that,
although personalization and interactivity arouse interest and behaviour, the overall levels
of ‘political interest caused by the website’ and ‘intention to revisit the website’ were
rather low. This might indicate that personalized and interactive communication strategies
are not sufficient to engender high levels of political interest and possible behaviour.
Perhaps, citizens’ trait characteristics, such as efficacy and civic skills (Verba et al.,
1995) are necessary for online political communication to have a strong positive impact
on political interest and behaviour. Future research needs to investigate whether the
effects of personalized and interactive communication are more pronounced for more
politically sophisticated citizens.
Interesting for future research is also the fact that the results of the scenario study are
similar to the ones found in the laboratory experiment. It could be argued that it is difficult
for participants to vividly imagine an ‘interactive’ website on the basis of a description of
a website. Especially since a description does not contain actual interactivity. Nonetheless,
on the basis of our results, participants seem to be able to clearly visualize a website in their
mind without actually visiting one. Therefore, the scenario design seem to be a valid
method for future research that studies the effects of online communication.
To sum up, the findings presented in this article contribute to theory about the effects
of political Internet use, by demonstrating that the characteristics of online communication
can contribute to citizens’ political involvement. An interesting finding, since scholars
who study the consequences of Internet use for political purposes disagree, and tend
to be more pessimistic about the impact of Internet use on citizens’political involvement
(for an overview of the literature, see Boulianne, 2009). Our study shows a more positive
view. It seems that the characteristics of new media are important elements that might
eventually explain the positive consequences of political Internet use. Since political parties
and their representatives are increasingly using more interactive features online and
making their communication more individual (e.g. by using Twitter), political involvement
among citizens could increase, which in the end will foster democracy. From this
viewpoint, the characteristics of online media become not only more important when
studying the effects of political Internet use, but also seem an important condition for the
effect Internet may have on democracy.
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Kruikemeier et al.	 61
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
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62	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
Appendix
Figure A1.  Scenarios used in Study 1 (the words in brackets varied).
Soon, national elections will be held. You decide to search on Internet for some additional
information about the elections. You turn on the Internet and type ‘national elections’ in
Google search. Google will take you to [the party website of D66/the personal website
of D66 leader Alexander Pechtold]. There, you find [the logo of D66/a picture of
Alexander Pechtold] and in addition, [the party’s programme/his biography]. You can
read that [the party was founded in 1966/he was born in 1965], [entered the government
for the first time in 1973/ since 2006 is a member of the parliament], and [that he is
married to Froukje Idema] and [a youth wing/that he has two young children]. The
website [contains information about the standpoints of/offers you the opportunity to
engage in a discussion with] [D66/Alexander Pechtold] and [the/his] party programme.
The website [contains/enables you to react on] news reports posted by [D66/Alexander
Pechtold]. [You can also read a report [D66/he] wrote, describing [their/his] opinions
about the election campaign/There is also a [personal] call made by [the party/him] to
participate in the election campaign]. Lastly, you can use a username to log [in/into an
online page where you can chat with [D66/Alexander Pechtold]].
Tolbert CJ and McNeal RS (2003) Unraveling the effects of the Internet on political participation?
Political Research Quarterly 56(2): 175–185.
Van Santen R and Van Zoonen L (2010) The personal in political television biographies. Biography
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Kruikemeier et al.	 63
Figure A2. Real-world website used in Study 2.
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64	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
Figure A2.  (Continued)
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Kruikemeier et al.	 65
Table A1.  Means, standard deviations and analysis of variance for effects on engagement in
political dialogues (contact) and closeness towards politics (Study 1).
Non-personalized Personalized Interaction
F(1, 645)
ηp
2
  Low
interactive
High
interactive
Low
interactive
High
interactive
Contact 3.49a 3.76a 3.63a 4.39b 6.78** .010
SD 1.29 1.40 1.30 1.15  
Closeness 3.44a 3.48a 3.33a 3.66b 3.00† .005
SD 1.25 1.45 1.32 1.32  
Notes: Means in the same row with a different subscript (for each personalization condition) differ significantly
from each other at the .05 level. ηp
2 = effect size. †p < .10; *p < .05; **p < .01.
Table A2.  Means, standard deviations and analysis of variance for effects on contact,
closeness, arouses interest and intention to revisit (Study 2).
Non-personalized Personalized Interaction
F(1, 255)
ηp
2
  Low
interactive
High
interactive
Low
interactive
High
interactive
Contact 1.92a 3.65b 2.11a 4.38b 5.56* .021
SD 0.75 1.12 0.76 1.11  
Closeness 2.86a 3.65b 2.89a 4.32b 4.85* .019
SD 1.14 1.13 1.14 1.00  
Arouses interest 2.68a 2.92a 2.49a 3.40b 3.10† .012
SD 1.29 1.30 1.13 1.34  
Intention to revisit 2.13a 1.97a 1.62a 2.45b 9.63** .036
SD 1.30 1.21 0.88 1.29  
Notes: Means in the same row with a different subscript (for each personalization condition) differ significantly
from each other at the .05 level. ηp
2 = effect size. †p < .10; *p < .05; **p < .01.
at Masarykova Univerzita on August 14, 2014ejc.sagepub.comDownloaded from
66	 European Journal of Communication 28(1)
Table A3.  Personalization and interactivity in the manipulated websites in study 2.
Concept Non-
personalized,
low interactive
Personalized,
low interactive
Non-personalized,
high interactive
Personalized, high
interactive
Interactivity
(hyperlinks)
0 0 11 11
Personalization (logo vs
photo)
Logo D66 Photo AP Logo D66 Photo AP
Personalization/
interactivity
(background
information)
Party
information on
homepage
Biography AP
on homepage
Party information
via hyperlink
Biography AP via
hyperlink
Personalization/
interactivity
(3 news items)
News items on
homepage; D66
centre of focus
News items on
homepage; AP
centre of focus
News items, with
hyperlink; D66
centre of focus
News items, with
hyperlink; AP
centre of focus
Personalization/
interactivity
(commenting on
news items)
– – Comments D66
and unknown
visitors
Comments AP
and unknown
visitors
Interactivity (sharing
news items on SNS)
– – + +
Interactivity (emailing
news items to others)
– – + +
Interactivity
(RSS feed)
– – + +
Interactivity (contact) – – + +
Interactivity
(participation in the
campaign)
– – + +
Interactivity (Twitter
feeds displayed in
website)
– – Twitter feeds
D66
Twitter feeds AP
Interactivity (links
to SNS and other
websites)
– – + +
Interactivity (link blog) – – Link blog D66 Link blog AP
AP = Alexander Pechtold (party leader D66); not present = –; present = +
at Masarykova Univerzita on August 14, 2014ejc.sagepub.comDownloaded from