Visual Political Communication

The assessment in this chapter of the role of visual media in politics focuses on three specific features of the digital-media landscape: (1) the proliferation of cameras, (2) the increasing accessibility of technologies for the editing and manipulation of images, and (3) viewers’ growing control over the circumstances of their consumption of mass media. The ubiquity of cameras has blurred the boundaries between on-stage and behind-the-scenes behavior. The emergence of digital photo-manipulation technology has given both amateurs and professionals a potent instrument not only of photo-fakery but also of explicit editorial commentary, and it has led to significant cultural changes in attitudes toward photographic truth. The audience’s increasing ability to shut out overt sales pitches has forced political campaigns to adjust their tactics to a world with limited tolerance for the persuasive techniques of the television age. The result has been a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between persuasion and entertainment, with substantial changes in the nature of the political process.

This chapter offers an overview of the communication psychology literature to demonstrate why visuals have the power to support attitudinal formation. Positing the average citizen as having low interest, visuals offer cognitive shortcuts to support decision making while also aiding the simplistic or lazy thinking which can lead to erroneous conclusions. However, visuals can also cause emotional resonance and make people engage and elaborate on the messages. In a world of fragmented and ubiquitous media, visuals play key functions in political communication and so in democratic processes. Visuals cut through communication clutter, but they are also used to manipulate their audience obscuring the source and purpose. The chapter shows how the role of visuals can be positive and negative.

This chapter positions political communication research within the broader field of visual research methods. Visual political communication research has its roots in a broad range of humanities and social science disciplines. Despite the emergence of a visual culture, the use of visual data in social research is still limited and lacks a systematic framework for the analysis of such data. The author begins this chapter by outlining a taxonomy of interdisciplinary research based on the origin and outlet of visual data. He then focuses specifically on visual political communication through social media, as this is now a ubiquitous and potent political phenomenon. He then reviews ten recently published analyses of visual social media data and examines the emerging patterns and gaps. The chapter concludes with recommendations that could help strengthen both the role of visual data in political communication research and our analysis of such data.

The field of political communication with its significant visual dimension and diverse use of both traditional and new media is particularly suited to be disclosed by a variety of visual approaches. This chapter takes a broad view on the visual dimensions of political phenomena whether or not they are pre-mediated into visual artifacts. It seeks to provide a systematic overview of different resources, methods, techniques, and technologies to capture, analyze, and communicate aspects and insights of visual political communication, thereby each time clearly specifying their specific affordances and limitations. While collecting and analyzing existing visual political communication products will be discussed, both in the offline and online world, the main focus in this chapter is on methods and techniques to produce new visual data and on ways to communicate findings and insights in the domain of visual political communication in a more visual, multimodal, and expressive way.

Negative campaigning, with its focus on the shortcomings of the policies/ideologies or the character of political opponent(s), has always been a part of political campaigning. Technological developments and digitalization have also taken negativity online. This chapter analyzes the development of campaigning using election posters in Germany and Sweden as empirical illustrations of how digitalization changes the prerequisites and use of negative campaigning. The results show how old campaign tools like election posters do not disappear, but rather adapt to digitalization, both in terms of production and dissemination. The conclusion highlights that there are good reasons to expect an increase of negativity in (online) electoral campaigning. Negative appeals can strategically be used to mobilize target groups in social media, without the risk of putting off other voters. The web and social network sites have also increased the possibility of counterattacks when being attacked by opponents. Negativity might also increase when voters have the possibility to change, replace, or comment on the messages.

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).

After a brief introduction to the Italian political and communication scene, this chapter analyzes the electoral materials produced in the last four weeks of campaigning by the main political parties and candidates of the Italian general elections of March 2018. It focuses its attention on the forms and instruments of visual communication. The author highlights the evolution of the instruments and languages of electoral campaigns: the disappearance of the traditional forms of visual political communication, such as the street posters and TV ads, on the one hand, and the spread of new tools such as web cards, memes, and videos, on the other hand, with the latter closely related to the spread of social networks. What emerges is that the logic and rhetoric of social platforms is progressively changing the visual vocabularies and the strategies of engagement of politics and election candidates. The visual component is an increasingly important element in the process of emotionalization of political communication.

From frequent scrum photos of the president holding up signed executive orders in the Oval Office to images of the president energetically sitting behind the wheel of a Mack truck parked outside his back door, like previous administrations, visuals have been central to Donald Trump’s presidency. This chapter analyzes the visuals on White House social media accounts (i.e., Twitter and Facebook) in Trump’s first 100 days in office and explores how his administration used visuals as an essential vehicle for storytelling, image building, and persuading. Building on previous research on the communicative functions of visual symbols in politics, the chapter finds that the Trump administration used socially mediated images to build an image based on success, power, and leadership and to legitimize his new administration.

Personalization has always been a feature of politics, but it seems to have been gaining momentum in recent decades. The increased attention to politicians as individuals implies that “they don’t only act more often as spokespersons for their respective parties, but also that they embody the party brand through their personal life and personality” (Olsson, 2017, p. 100). Contrary to the age of the traditional mass media—especially television—when journalists would mainly choose which images of the politicians would be published, Instagram provides politicians with the ability to actively form their public image. In this sense, the research presented in this chapter is a first attempt to examine Instagram as a political communication tool in Greece, offering an insight in the similarities and differences of political performance strategies via the Instagram platform.

It is a common assumption that facial expressions of politicians, such as a smile, are powerful tools to draw attention and evoke positive impressions. However, previous research has not fully linked politicians’ nonverbal behavior, viewers’ visual attention and their political impression formation. To address this gap, the research presented in this chapter uses a multi-method design to explore the role of a politician’s smiling for viewers’ judgments about him. More precisely, a laboratory study examined the visual attention (eye-tracking; n = 122) and spontaneous judgments of viewers (continuous response measurement; n = 125) while the participants were exposed to an excerpt of a German local televised debate. Moreover, half of the participants viewed the video in a full audiovisual version while the other half watched a video-only version.

The murder of MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016 brought the UK EU Referendum campaign to a shocked standstill, as reports emerged that the killer had shouted ‘Britain First’ after shooting and stabbing the MP. This chapter examines the role of the aesthetic and symbolic in the tweets shared by those responding to Jo Cox’s death. The author demonstrates how linkages between popular culture forms, visual tropes and symbols were deployed by those both expressing their identification as an emergent compassionate collectivity and, to a lesser degree, those who articulated their support for her murderer’s actions. The visual sharing practices on Twitter re-cast Jo Cox as a retrospective public figure whose values are to be admired. In becoming a publicly recognizable figure in the wake of her violent death, Jo Cox’s values become crystallized by the creative efforts of others, who form a community around her image and political vision.

Brazil held its presidential elections in 2018. In this context, the Socialism and Liberty Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade [PSOL]) chose two candidates who were members of social movements to run as candidates for president and vice-president: Guilherme Boulos from the Homeless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto [MTST]) and Sonia Guajajara from the Articulation of the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples’ Movement (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil [APIB]). This chapter argues that this represents a strategy of “connective politics” in which the party borrows some of the movements’ causes and turns them into relatable personalized messages. In order to illustrate this, the authors chose one video from each of the social actors (PSOL, MTST, and APIB) and used YouTube’s Data Tools to map out each video’s network of related videos. By doing so, they hope to shed light on how political strategies and algorithms interact, delving into the ways in which YouTube mediates political audiovisual content through its recommendation system.