Evaluation of 2014 local elections candidate campaign images

2023

On 3rd April 2022 parliamentary elections were held in Hungary. Both the governing coalition and the opposition parties campaigned to get into government, and the campaign could be followed through billboards as well. This paper focuses on billboards of both the government and the opposition side. The study seeks to answer the question of what specific linguistic and visual means are used to achieve the desired effect of influencing voters and what communication methods are used by billboard makers. The study interprets the billboards as multimodal texts and analyses the combined meaning of the textual message and the visual world. The comparison of the billboards shows that the FIDESZ-KDNP coalition was more successful to identify the leader of the opposing coalition, Péter Márki-Zay with the negative past and itself with the positive future. Based on the results of the 2022 election we can say that the visual, easy-tounderstand representation of the simple message of FIDESZ-KDNP had a greater impact on voters than the textual messages of the United for Hungary coalition.

This thesis was presented in part fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at University College Dublin. The following is an examination of the visual culture of the 2016 American Elections, looking explicitly at how the Republican and Democratic parties utilised their visual culture to construct and communicate a certain image of their respective candidates to voters throughout the campaign period. This thesis will explore the visual culture of both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns to compile a fully realised study of the 2016 U.S. elections through visual culture. As political campaigns usually aspire to emulate the successes of their predecessors, a portion of this thesis will be devoted to the discussion of one of the most successful visual political campaigns of recent years- Barack Obama 2008. This campaign is seen as the 'gold standard' for political imagery and indeed this legacy often eclipsed the visual culture of the 2016 elections. By looking at the Obama 2008 campaign, one can get a sense of how good graphic design can be a valuable aspect of a successful political campaign. To balance the propagandistic bias of examining solely the official imagery of the Republican and Democratic parties, this thesis will also examine how unofficial imagery challenged and ridiculed the carefully constructed personas of the candidates. Assessing political cartoons produced in 2016, which deal with manipulating and adapting the official visual culture, will demonstrate the more critical sides of both campaign's imagery and beliefs. By looking at the way in which both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns chose to portray their candidates through visual means, one can assess how effective good graphic design was on the overall campaign and whether both candidates effectively projected their political message across to the voting public. This thesis will primarily look at the ways in which visual political propaganda can influence voters and challenge perceptions of a candidate.

2021

Campaign posters are semiotic-discursive resources that form multimodal units of meaning. In political communication, voters' decision making is affected not only by the verbal message, but also by nonverbal indications or physical features (visual attributes) of the candidates. This study analyzed the relationship between visual communication and citizens' voting decisions in a political campaign in Colombia. An analysis of campaign posters in the 2019 Bogotá mayoral elections was designed using a multi-technique methodology. First, two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess attention patterns. Then, a series of surveys measured emotions in slogans. It was concluded that, in the Colombian scene, visual elements related to candidates' physical attributes have a small influence over voters' decision making. This finding contradicts the results of studies carried out in different contexts, namely in Europe and the United States.

Journal of Communication, 2004

This content analysis examines the use of visual elements such as photographs and graphic elements in public journalism and traditional newspapers during the general election of 2000. Public journalism newspapers used more graphic elements to convey issues and analysis, common ground and solutions, and to present information that citizens can use to contact the media than did traditional journalism, but it did not translate mobilizing information or views of citizens into graphic form more frequently than nonpublic journalism stories, nor did it use more photographs of citizens than candidates, officials, and experts. This paper links the theory behind public journalism, Yankelovich's theory of public opinion, with Paivio's dual-coding theory of how visual and verbal information can be pooled together, to suggest that a better theoretical model is achieved when the theory of public opinion includes the role of visual information in helping citizens come to better public judgment.

Anadolu Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2018

This study examines how photographic depictions of political candidates published prior to the elections are utilized. Photographic representations of political candidates, involve descriptive characteristics such as posture, posing, facial expressions and clothing style. At the same time, non-verbal clues such as smiling and raising eyebrows, which often have positive effect, are some of the factors affecting their physical attractions. Such characteristics are essential when individuals' perceptions are considered, and they are significant components of political communication. This study examines, how visual clues and composition elements in politicians' images, readers interpret and evaluates the findings and conclusions accordingly. Objective and intuitive interpretations of four political party leaders-who were represented through 121 photographs published on three high-circulation newspapers in Turkey for three weeks prior to June 7th 2015 Turkish General Elections-were sought by using Q-sort and qualitative interview techniques. The research question of the study is as follows: How do readers interpret composition elements of politicians' representations and evaluate them?

This content analysis examines the use of visual elements such as photographs and graphic elements in public journalism and traditional newspapers during the general election of 2000. Public journalism newspapers used more graphic elements to convey issues and analysis, common ground and solutions, and to present information that citizens can use to contact the media than did traditional journalism, but it did not translate mobilizing information or views of citizens into graphic form more frequently than nonpublic journalism stories, nor did it use more photographs of citizens than candidates, officials, and experts. This paper links the theory behind public journalism, Yankelovich's theory of public opinion, with Paivio's dual-coding theory of how visual and verbal information can be pooled together, to suggest that a better theoretical model is achieved when the theory of public opinion includes the role of visual information in helping citizens come to better public judgment.

This study examines how photographic depictions of political candidates published prior to the elections are utilized. Photographic representations of political candidates , involve descriptive characteristics such as posture , posing, facial expressions and clothing style. At the same time, non-verbal clues such as smiling and raising eyebrows, which often have positive effect, are some of the factors affecting their physical attractions. Such characteristics are essential when individuals' perceptions are considered, and they are significant components of political communication. This study examines, how visual clues and composition elements in politicians' images, readers interpret and evaluates the findings and conclusions accordingly. Objective and intuitive interpretations of four political party leaders – who were represented through 121 photographs published on three high-circulation newspapers in Turkey for three weeks prior to June 7th 2015 Turkish General Elections-were sought by using Q-sort and qualitative interview techniques. The research question of the study is as follows: How do readers interpret composition elements of poli-ticians' representations and evaluate them? Öz Bu çalışma, siyasilerin seçim öncesi medyada yer alan fotoğrafik tasvirleriyle görünürlüklerinin nasıl kullan-dıklarını incelemektedir. Siyasi adayların fotoğrafik sunumlarında tanımlayıcı özellikler bulunmaktadır; duruşu, pozu, yüz ifadesi ve giyim tarzı gibi. Aynı zamanda gülümseme, kaş kaldırma gibi olumlu etki yaratan sözsüz ipuçları fiziksel çekiciliklerini etkile-mektedir. Bu tür özellikler bireysel algılamada önem-lidir ve siyasal iletişimin kapsamındadır. Bu çalışma, politikacı imajlarındaki görsel ipuçlarını ve kompozis-yon elemanlarını, izleyicinin nasıl yorumladığını araş-tırmakta ve bulgularla sonuçları değerlendirmektedir. Bir kart sıralama (Q-sort) ve nitel görüşme tekniği kul-lanılarak, izleyicilerin 7 Haziran 2015 Türkiye Genel Seçimleri öncesinde, üç yaygın gazetede bir hafta bo-yunca yayınlanan fotoğraflarla (121) temsil edilen dört parti liderinin tasvirlerindeki öznel ve sezgisel yorum-ları yakalanmaya çalışılmaktadır. Çalışmanın araş-tırma sorusu şöyledir: İzleyici, politikacıların sunulan tasvirlerinin değerliğini ve kompozisyon elemanlarını nasıl yorumlamaktadır?

Sage Handbook of Political Communication, 2012

Election Posters Around the Globe, 2017

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Central European Journal of Politics, 2021

In the context of political communication, political campaigns are the periods when political bias in the news media comes to light. This is reflected in news photos and other visual contents as well as newspaper texts. Visual framing, a newer area in framing theory and research, helps us understand how media frames visual images of political candidates. This paper analyzes the photographs of the presidential candidates in the 2014 Turkish presidential election campaign by using the visual framing analysis method. The data for this study comprises photographs from ten daily national newspapers belonging to different media groups representative of the Turkish press. The results reveal the intensity of visual framing bias related to political bias and polarization in the Turkish press.