Žiniasklaidos įtaka lyderio įvaizdžiui 2008-ųjų metų Seimo rinkimuose ; Media influences on the image of leaders in the parliamentary election of 2008

Abstract

Nowadays politics becomes more and more related to communication. Fast growth of information technologies determines simultaneous development of communication strategies and technologies. Contemporary voters' behavior theories say that voters put no or minimal effort to searching for political information. When making important political decisions people refer to the information that they can easily get or to the information which they receive as a side product of their other activities. Other obvious tendency of voters' behavior shows that the leader and the image of the leader of political party becomes much more important than the ideology and political party itself. Not ideological but emotional factors are the basis for the political decisions. These tendencies make the image of politician and its construction an actual topic and worthy of deeper analysis. The object of this work is the media influences on the image of leaders in the parliamentary election of 2008. The aim of this thesis is to determine the media influence on the image of the leaders and the results of the parliamentary elections of 2008. The objectives of this work are: to define the term of the image and the composite parts of it, to define the common attributes of the political leaders, to structure the process of image making and to propose the scheme of the image construction process, to analyze popular images of politicians and political communications tendencies, to describe image communication technologies and to determine the influences on the image of leaders in the parliamentary election of 2008 by implementing two: quantitative and qualitative empirical researches – the content analysis and the expert interview. The hypotheses of the study are: 1. The images of political leaders of the Lithuanian Liberal and Centre Union and Liberlals' Movement of the Republic of Lithuania reflected in the media had the major influence on the results of the parliamentary election of 2008. 2. Positive information makes positive influence and negative information makes negative influence on the leader's image and the results of parliamentary elections. The working methods in a theoretical part of this work are: analysis, systematization and classification of the secondary data, comparative, analogy, logical methods, induction. The methods in a practical part of this work are: content analysis and expert interview. The results of the expert interview proved out the main hypothesis of the work. Images of the political leaders of the Lithuanian Liberal and Centre Union and Liberlals' Movement of the Republic of Lithuania political parties had the major role on the results of the parliamentary election of 2008. The images of the leaders in the media and the use of the media determined the decision of the voters and the results of the parliamentary election. Even if the quantitative research showed the correlation between the negative information in the media and worse election results, the second hypothesis proved out only partially. The results of the qualitative research showed that both – positive and negative information raise people awareness about the leader and makes positive changes. If the leader is not seen in the media he is invisible to people. But for the negative information to make a negative impact and to turn the of the voter attitude to the worse, the information about the leader must be formatted very and spread very intensively. Secondly the influence of the negative information depends on the reliability of channel and thirdly it depends on the loyalty to the party. If the channel that spreads negative information is unreliable, the voter will not believe it and this negative information can even lead to opposite effect – the voter will support the leader even more. If the voter is very loyal to the certain political party or leader it will be very difficult to change his opinion and make him change his choice.