Title: The battle of the budget – Communication in a modern policy (Slaget om budgeten –Kommunikation inom den moderna politiken)Numbers of pages: 39Author: Niclas KarlssonTutor: Peder Hård af SegerstadCourse: Media and Communication studies CPeriod: Autumn 2009University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science,Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The purpose of the paper is to see how Minister of Finance Anders Borg andthe Social Democratic economic spokesman Thomas Östros communicate their messages tothe public.Material/Method: The material is the minutes of the budget debate in the SwedishParliament. The method is rhetorical analysis and content analysis.Main result: Trust making is very important for both of them, especially when the financecrisis reached Sweden. The most common rhetorical quality is ethos.Keywords: Strategic political communication, rhetorical analysis, political trust.

The majority of the Swedish political organizations use social media today since it allows them to quickly and directly communicate with potential voters. By sharing personal content on the side of politics, politicians have contributed to create a digital landscape where they no longer depend on traditional media to reach out with their agendas. Political communication on social media, and especially Instagram, is in need of further exploration in order to develop a wider understanding of communicative strategies on the platform. This thesis is based on two posts each from five of the biggest Swedish political party leaders individual user accounts on Instagram. The time period of one month before the former election of the year 2022 is defined to limit the analysis during a period when the political communication is particularly intense. The purpose of the thesis is by the use of a qualitative multimodal analysis as a method investigate how the party leaders frame their Instagram posts in order to represent themselves through pictures with the belonging captions, and at the same time analyze how they frame their professional and/or personal persona in the very same posts. At last resemblances and/or differences in the posts are investigated in order to identify whether or not there might be certain patterns in the political communication to be acknowledged during the election campaign.   The thesis is mainly found from Erving Goffman's theory about dramaturgical perspectives, and uses specific terms from its papers such as ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ to describe what kind of persona (professional and/or personal) the party leaders intend to portray in each post. Serge Moscovici's theory about social representations is also used to better understand the usage of for example cultural symbols in the posts, but the theory is only used to a certain extent to complete where we found Goffman’s theory to lack perspective.  The results from the analysis of the party leaders' posts were that they still used the same kind of strategic communication to portray themselves as hard working politicians, as former studies showed they did before the election of 2018. Although some leaders showed a bit more content from their backstage/personal life than others, it turned out that none of the posts was non-political, hence every post was set out to be performed in their professional role as political party leader. This means that the Swedish party leaders still use Instagram as a platform to mainly communicate political agendas, and not to show themselves off as celebrities or influencers which some media have contributed them to be portrayed as.

During the past ten years, European politics experienced a rise of far right-wing parties because of intensified levels of insecurity among the public (Falasca & Grandien, 2017). These parties organize their political discourse around topics of nationalism and a strong opinion against immigration, the Euro and the European Union (Breeze, 2019; Häusler, 2018). One of these parties is the Alternative for Germany (AfD) which celebrated a major success in the federal elections in 2017 where it became the third largest party in the German Bundestag.   The present study aims to analyze the campaign posters of the AfD as one element of their strategic political communication for the 2017 election period in the context of the party’s growing popularity among German society. To accomplish that goal, the qualitative method of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is applied. The MCDA analyzes written and visual content. The study seeks to identify the narratives implemented by the party and analyze them by drawing on the concept of nationalism. Furthermore, the analysis aims to identify the frames created around the main issues addressed in the party’s political agenda by discussing them in relation to the concepts of ontological security and existential anxiety by Giddens (1991) and the framing theory by Goffman (1974).   The study reveals that the AfD highlights in its political communication one main conflict: The German public versus the immigrants. The immigrants are framed as the threatening strange other whose cultural values, and religious beliefs contradict with those of the Germans who are depicted as the victims. This is achieved through the posters which seek to elicit fear and hatred towards the strange new to increase the insecurities perceived by the public. The party, on the contrary, represents itself as the savior of the German nation, its traditions, and values which they aim to maintain and protect from Muslim influence.

This study aims to describe the strategic political communication of the Identitarian Movement in Austria (in German known as Identitäre Bewegung Österreich) and concentrates on identifying means of persuasive language on the homepage of the movement, which is known to be nationalistic and critical towards migration. The study is based on a corpus containing a selection of blog entries, as well as a sample of images published on the homepage, and is carried out using a qualitative method combining discourse linguistics, systemic-functional linguistics and multimodal theory. The analysis sets off by describing the field component of systemic-functional theory and proceeds to examining tenor and mode. The focus will be specifically on firstly, investigating a) discourse participants and the processes they engage in and b) interaction between the implied sender and recipient in the verbal material; and secondly, describing how these meanings are reproduced visually in the image sample used. The findings suggest that the movement not only strives to portray itself as powerful and authoritative but also relies on means of solidarity in order to convince the recipient of its message. More specifically, it is shown that the migrant participants are discriminated and depersonalised whilst a close synthetic relationship is established with the implied reader, i.e. the homepage visitor. Furthermore, the movement makes an effort to picture itself as a representative of numerous groups and interests in society. By doing so it apparently attempts to simulate a representative discourse, in order to present the xenophobic stance it agitates for as a majority opinion. The analysis shows also that these practices can be seen throughout the corpus, that is, in the verbal texts as well as in the imagery.