For many years, political communication scholars believed that political campaigns have only minimal effects on the public and subsequently on election results. The main justification for this minimal effects hypothesis was the fact that scholars found it impossible to measure and identify substantial persuasion effects that are the outcome of a campaign. But for more than a decade now, scholars who study political campaigns hypothesize that political campaigns have a strong persuasive effect on the voters. They argue that such persuasive effects could hardly be measured because most major political campaigns are relatively balanced, and therefore have a canceling-out effect. They hypothesize that it would be possible to measure the effects of persuasion in an extremely asymmetric campaign, but they hardly find any such major campaigns in modern times. The campaign over Sharon’s disengagement plan in Israel was extremely imbalanced and is therefore an interesting and important example

The article focuses on the detection of minimal effects in imbalanced political campaigns. The minimal effects hypothesis is slowly loosing its paradigmatic position in the field of political communication. Among the reasons for this paradigmatic change are the recognition in importance of the indirect cognitive effects of the campaign. These include findings on the educational role of campaigns, campaign effects on voter turnout and the short-term effects of campaign events.

This study addresses one central problem and two major controversies in the study of political personalization. The central problem is that of mixing different types of political personalization. This research suggests a typology that distinguishes between various types of political personalization: institutional, media and behavioral. The first controversy concerns the very occurrence of the process of personalization. This study identifies personalization(s) in Israel in all three realms: institutional personalization, expressed in the democratization of candidate selection methods; personalization in the media, expressed in an increase in the focus of media coverage on individual politicians and a decrease in focusing on political parties; and personalization in the behavior of politicians, expressed in an increase in the share of legislation that is initiated through private member bills. The second controversy concerns the causal relationship between the different types of person