Storytelling through images: how leaders managed their visual communication on Facebook during the 2019 European election campaign

ABSTRACT

In contemporary democracies, the image that political leaders project is of central importance to their electoral appeal, however, studies of image projection have mainly been based on textual messages, undermining often visual content such as photos, memes and postcards. This study explores populist leaders image projection through visuals on Facebook in a cross-national context, with the aim of verifying if politicians use images to promote their political action or if they instead implement more complex strategies of self-branding and personalisation. The analysis focuses on the election campaign period for the 2019 European elections and proposes a comparison between four leaders that joined the European Parliament’s Group of Identity and Democracy, namely Matteo Salvini for Italy, Heinz-Christian Strache for Austria, Marine Le Pen for France and Alice Weidel for Germany. According to our analysis, important differences emerge in the use that leaders make of the images disseminated on Facebook. Some of them, in fact, disseminate almost exclusively images that are strictly related to their electoral campaign, while others seek a true identification with their voters, following the pattern of intimization.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual communication
• celebrity politics
• intimization
• personalisation
• electoral campaigns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Milena Gabanelli and Simone Ravizza ‘Matteo Salvini e «La Bestia»: come catturare 4 milioni di fan sui social’ https://www.corriere.it/dataroom-milena-gabanelli/matteo-salvini-la-bestia-come-catturare-4-milioni-fan-social-facebook-twitter-instagram/a00069d2-f33f-11e9-ad64-4488d500d2a2-va.shtml (last consulting 14/09/21)

2. Intercoder reliability was conducted through a random sample of 81 pictures that were independently coded twice by a different trained coder. The Krippendorff’s alpha score is 0.753 for the variable image purpose; 0.87 for the variable type of personalisation; 0.812 for the variable type of intimization.

3. The variable type of personalisation has been coded only on those images that in the ‘image purpose’ variable have been coded as ‘personalisation’. Total number of images analysed for each leader: Weidel 7; Strache 20; Le Pen 23; Salvini 341.

4. Due to the small number of intimized images we decided to work in absolute values. Alice Weidel has been excluded from the graph because she did not publish any intimized image.

5. Table 1 does not include the images coded as ‘not applicable’ for this variable (4 images in total).