The evolution within political parties shows an increase of professionalisation where a higher competence is on demand and is practised on a communicative level. Currently a lot of the research surrounding this professionalisation has been focused on only political parties , but at the same time other stakeholders is also working within the political area without being political parties. How does political youth associations, that is widely driven by volunteers, navigate within this political context where the demands and expectations is constantly increasing? The purpose of this study was to examine how political communication is practised by political youth associations in a world that gets increasingly more professional. The study was conducted by analysing every post published during the month of January 2018 by the two political youth associations SSU and MUF on their Facebook and Instagram pages. The chosen method of this study has been Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, complemented by qualitative interviews with the heads of digital communication of both associations. The theories applied on the material was different approaches to discourses, mainly the thoughts of Michel Foucault, combined with how discourses can shape identities. The theories by Erving Goffman concerning the presentation of self and, by extension, the presentation of organisations, was also used. By applying these to the material, six different themes were identified.These can be divided into two subsections, content and form, which lay the groundwork for the central result of this study. Both associations have to balance the work of attracting new members and maintaining a trustworthy political image. This is the result of political communication that has become highly professional.

The research explored the public support towards the political communication carried out during COVID-19 in India. Through the means of a structured questionnaire based on Easton's dimensions of public support, responses were collected from 200 respondents, 100 each from the academic background of journalism and psychology. To determine the support towards the government performance during the crisis times based on the political communication done by the current regime in India. The results suggested that the public support is quite less from the respondents of journalism background. However, the psychology respondents showed relatively high support towards the political communication done by the Indian government in the COVID-19. It suggests that the public support is not one but scattered and also the academic background could play a major role in one's understanding of the political communication and lending of the support. The research demonstrated how respondents from different backgrounds show almost the opposite support towards political communication in the times of crisis. This gives out a good comparison and also concludes the public support. Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, political communication, crisis communication, public support, India.

Magister Commercii - MCom / In May 2019, South Africa held its sixth democratic national and provincial elections. 48 political parties participated in this general election compared to the 19 that participated in 2014. Thus, the 2019 elections witnessed a significant broadening of political options that could appeal to the electorate. At the same time mechanisms for political parties to communicate and engage with voters have also evolved. Research has shown that ‘new media’, commonly known as social media (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for example), have increasingly become part of the political communication methods within electoral democracies. Given this, the study aimed to conduct a deep analysis of the use of Twitter as a communication tool by the African National Congress (ANC), Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) during the election campaign period of 2019. The study adopted a qualitative method, by having a virtual ethnography approach to collect Twitter feeds. In addition, a Twitter survey was conducted in order to understand how the users received the political campaigns on the platform. The analysis was guided by the theoretical framework of Foot and Schneider (2006) which outlines and discusses four pillars (or functions) of online campaigning namely: “informing, involving, connecting and mobilizing”.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

We present a study on the automatic classification of speech acts in the domain of political communication, based on J. R. Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts. Our research involves creating a dataset using the US State of the Union corpus and the UN General Debate corpus (UNGD) as data sources. To overcome limited labelled data, we employ a combination of weak supervision and active learning techniques for dataset creation and model training. Through various experiments, we investigate the influence of external and internal factors on speech act classification. In addition, we discuss the potential for further analysis of speech act usage, using the trained model on the UNGD corpus. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of Transformer-based models for automatic speech act classification, highlight the benefits of weak supervision and active learning for dataset creation and model training, and underscore the potential for large-scale statistical analysis of speech act usage in the domain of political communication