Pandemic Persona and Digital Culture: The Role of Celebrity Politicians on Social Networks

Abstract

The paper discusses a specific intersection of the politics, celebrity, and digital culture. In the last few decades, more and more people from the entertainment realm entered the world of institutional politics trying to leverage their popularity. Thanks to the media, they manage to transfer their celebrity capital, namely accumulated media visibility and recognisability (Driesens 2013) into the political sphere. In the beginning, they improve their visibility with the help of mass media that place their personas and private lives in the focus of public attention. However, with the digitalization of the media, the popular-political landscape has changed (Marshall 2020), so today they have dispositional new bases for practising personalized politics, i.e. imposing their personality instead of political party programmes. In this paper, attention is directed to former American president Donald Trump, president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Miroslav Škoro, who was a candidate in the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Croatia. Although there were obvious differences between these three celebrities mentioned before entering the political arena, their later use of social networks vividly shows how they built their political/pandemic persona in the evolving mediatization of politics.