Visual group appeals as a campaigning tool: a comparison of Facebook and television ads

This paper examines how groups are included in election campaign visuals across television and social media adverts. Existing literature researching the visual in election campaigns tends to focus on how individual candidates are framed, and Grabe and Bucy’s (2009) ideal candidate and populist campaigner frames remain prominent. This paper argues the need to move beyond this framework and consider new ways to study the visual in the social media era by considering how other actors and groups are used within images. In order to understand how visual communication strategies are used on social media, I will analyse television adverts as a comparison, while considering the audiences and affordances of each medium. On one hand, existing studies suggest that candidates will be motivated to appeal broadly, to reduce the chance of mistargeting and to appeal to as many people as possible (Hersh and Schaffner 2013; Somer-Topcu 2015). On the other hand, the visual offers an opportunity for candidates to include a low-risk appeal to groups because candidates can include group images to signal support, without explicitly saying this. I have developed a coding framework for content analysis to examine the type of groups used by candidates and whether targeting is explicit or implicit. Furthermore, I will evaluate whether the group appeal is meaningful depending on whether the ad includes information on a policy issue. Over the next 2 months I will apply the coding scheme to a sample of 3000 television and social media adverts of 66 Democratic and Republican candidates running for the 2020 US Senate elections. I will evaluate whether candidates consistently appeal to the same groups to build a strong base as in Raynauld and Turcotte’s (2018) study, or whether they indeed appeal broadly to capture as many voters as possible. In my presentation I will provide an overview of my coding framework, present my key findings, and use examples of candidates who are using groups in interesting ways. References Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. (2009). Image Bite Politics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372076.001.0001 Hersh, E. D., & Schaffner, B. F. (2013). Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity. The Journal of Politics, 75(2), 520–534. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381613000182 Raynauld, V., & Turcotte, A. (2018). “Different Strokes for Different Folks”: Implications of Voter Micro-Targeting and Appeal in the Age of Donald Trump. In J. Gillies (Ed.), Political Marketing in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (pp. 11–28). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59345-6_2 Somer-Topcu, Z. (2015). Everything to Everyone: The Electoral Consequences of the Broad-Appeal Strategy in Europe. American Journal of Political Science, 59(4), 841–854. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12165