7. Political Parties and Their Pictures: Visual Communication on Instagram in Swedish and Norwegian Election Campaigns

Understanding campaign communication as highly strategic, this chapter discusses this digital visual turn in campaign communication based on the previous literature in the fields of visual communication and political communication as well as empirical studies conducted in Sweden and Norway. Following Rose’s (Visual methodologies. An introduction to researching with visual materials, Sage, 2016) perspective of visual communication, we focus on the production of images and the image itself. Thereby, we explore the meaning of Instagram postings and analyze what (iconography) is displayed in the Instagram posting and how. Hence the empirical study asks whether political parties use Instagram (1) in terms of broadcasting information to parties’ stakeholders, (2) to mobilize supporters, (3) to manage the party’s and politicians’ images and (4) to amplify and complement other campaign material (i.e. hybrid campaign use). The content analysis includes all Instagram postings published during the last four weeks of the 2014 Swedish election campaign (n = 150) and the 2017 Norwegian election campaign (n = 272).