Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 crisis is not only a pandemic, but also an infodemic. In the editorial for this Special Issue about health campaigns and COVID-19, we offer an overview of the context as well as of the three articles in the issue. This opening editorial focuses on the wider context within which the various campaigns took place. While the essays focus on the use of graphics and visual advertisements, we explore meme culture with special emphasis on character assassination, where memes are used to target accountability claims and engender distrust towards powerholders. Hence this presents a backdrop to the cultural and visual environment into which these responses to the global spread of COVID-19 entered.

One of the most common ways politicians are portrayed in political advertising is with a friendly, smiling face to persuade the voters to cast their votes on him/her on Election Day. This archetypical image of politicians can be found around the globe even if research shows that smiling faces of politicians to some extent are connected to national and party culture. This article takes the theoretical point of departure in rhetoric and seeks to analyse the use of smile as a way to build ethos in relation to the electorate. The analysis builds on a dataset that consists of more than 3000 Swedish election posters from 1907 to 2019 and tracks the use of the smile as facial expression on posters to the late 1960s. Before that, politicians always put up a serious facial expression on posters. After the breakthrough, the smiling politician has become the dominant portrayal of Swedish politicians on election posters in contemporary politics. The explanation of this development is related to the personalization and intimization of politics, which to a large extent was due to the advent of television. However, a general questioning of authorities and a more equal society are probably also important drivers. There are signs of similar developments in other countries, but the authors call for more studies to validate the results.

The authors explore the question of whether activity on the part of Swedish authorities aimed at shaping public opinion has shifted from the dissemination of information to the issuing of propaganda. Their project involves four case studies of different agencies. Issues explored are the questions and themes taken up by authorities and which forms of opinion shaping organizations share in common, as well as which forms are unique to a specific type of administration. Adapted from the source document.

In the theory and practice of democratic politics, elections are essential. Not only is voting the one activity that binds the individual to the political system, elections are also expected to mobilize people politically. Thus, the purpose of this article is to study the mobilizing effects of national elections, using Sweden as a case study. More specifically, this article investigates political interest, party identification, trust in political and media institutions, media consumption and satisfaction with the way democracy works through the electoral cycles between 1986 and 2004. The results indicate that elections do mobilize people politically, but not with regard to the media variables. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract
This article gives an overview of previous research on negativity with a particular view on the definitions of negative advertising and operationalizations in content analyses, and briefly summarizes the specificities that must be taken into account in a poster's design. It then presents findings on German and Swedish posters.

1. Introduction: A campaign (more or less) about the European Union -- 2. The First European Election Campaign in the Time of Social Media -- 3. Getting More Intense: Quantitative and Qualitative Dynamics of Political Communication on Facebook -- 4. Visual Personalization in the 2019 EU Election Campaign -- 5. Gender and Multimodality in 2019 European Parliament Election Campaign -- 6. The climate of public opinion and emotional strategies in 2019 European Parliament election campaign -- 7. Attacking each other, attacking Europe – Negative advertising in the 2019 European election -- 8. Green as Greta? Environmental Issues in the 2019 European Election Campaigns -- 9. A Gulf Across the Irish Sea? The European Election Campaigns in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland -- 10. Multicultural Representations in the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament Election Campaigns -- 11. Campaigns without Frontiers? The Europeanisation of the 2019 Elections based on the appearance of foreign public figures in national campaigns -- 12. Similar Aims, Different Approaches: An Analyze of Campaign Video Ads in the Baltic States -- 13. Online Parties and Digital Campaign -- 14. Europe or Homeland? How populist right-wing parties in national governments campaigned on Facebook in the 2019 European elections -- 15. Talking about 'International Sovereignty'. A comparative analysis of the Identity and Democracy parties campaigning in the 2019 European Elections -- 16.Campaigning for Europe 'after' the Economic 'Crisis': The Cases of Greece and Portugal -- 17. Between Euroscepticism and Euro-optimism in Newer EU Member States.