Barack Obama has again been named as Time magazine’s person of the year.

The president has now been awarded the accolade twice – the last time was 2008 when he won his first presidential election.

Time magazine said the United States is in the midst of huge cultural and demographic changes and deemed Mr Obama to be both the symbol and in some ways a driving force behind that transformation.

“He’s basically the beneficiary and the author of a kind of a New America, a new demographic, a new cultural America that he is now the symbol of,” managing editor Rick Stengel told NBC’s Today programme, as he revealed the result live on air.

The magazine noted that Mr Obama was the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win more than 50% of the vote in two straight elections and the first since 1940 to be re-elected despite a jobless rate above 7.5%.

He beat Republican Mitt Romney soundly in November’s election to win a second four year term.

Mr Stengel said he won support from voters who “actually don’t care about politics.”

“Using the coalition of the ascendant young voters, millennial, Hispanics minorities, he’s creating a new alignment, a kind of re alignment like Ronald Reagan did 40 years ago,” he said.

The short list for the honour included Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head for advocating for girls’ education.

It also included Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Italian physicist Fabiola Giannati.

Time’s editors have been selecting the person, group or thing that has had the single greatest impact during the past 12 months for 85 years.

But the impact has not always been for the better.

Among the more notorious recipients are Adolf Hitler in 1938, Joseph Stalin in 1943 and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

Last year’s conceptual choice of The Protester – a nod to a turbulent year of public demonstrations spearheaded by the Occupy movement – also split opinion.