187 © The Author(s) 2019 A. Veneti et al. (eds.), Visual Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3_10 CHAPTER 10 Greek Political Leaders on Instagram: Between “Soft” and “Hard” Personalization Stamatis Poulakidakos and Iliana Giannouli POLITICS AND PERSONALIZATION Personalization has always been a feature of politics (Balmas & Sheafer, 2015, p. 3), but as many scholars agree, it seems to have been gaining momentum in recent decades (Balmas, Rahat, Sheafer, & Shenhav, 2014, p. 37). Political personalization denotes a process in which “politicians become the main anchor of interpretations and evaluations” in the politi- cal feld (Reinemann & Wilke, 2007, p. 101) or as Karvonen puts it “the core of the personalization hypothesis is the notion that individual politi- cal actors have become more prominent at the expense of parties and col- lective identities” (2010, p. 4). This increase in the personalization of politics can be attributed to sev- eral factors: The ethos of modernity posits a shift from social embedded- ness toward individuality (Accetti & Wolkenstein, 2017, p. 99), which in the political scene can also be translated into a decline in party identifca- tion and partisanship (Boumans, Boomgaarden, & Vliegenthart, 2013, p. 198; Holtz-Bacha, Langer, & Merkle, 2014, p. 154). The fact that opposing parties hold no substantial differences in their political programs S. Poulakidakos (*) ∙ I. Giannouli National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece e-mail: giannoul@media.uoa.gr