ABSTRACT
The German political landscape faces an increasingly strong loss of political interest that is growing into a problem, especially with young voters. This is why political parties have turned to professionalization, mediatization, and personalization strategies to find new ways to convince voters and to communicate their ideas through more contemporary methods (Korte, 2013). In connection to studies about political marketing, a new trend of political communication emerged where political players use entertainment to convince voters and other recipients (Holtz-Bacha, 2004). This rising significance of entertainment in politics is especially caused by two major changes: the privatization of the media that in turn led to increased commercial competition within the media landscape (Holtz-Bacha & Norris, 2001) and technological changes including the rise of the Internet during the 1990s ( Jungherr & Schoen, 2013; van Eimeren & Ridder, 2001). With these changes in the political landscape, candidates fight for a scarce resource: attention. Political candidates often use entertainment to try to gain the attention of people. The use of modern media like television empowered political players the possibility to personally set themselves on stage. This is why political parties started to sell politics like entertainment.
