The ever-changing landscape of social media coupled with today’s competitive political environment, means that small parties need to use all the tools at their disposal to distinguish themselves from the crowd. The Christian Democrats, a conservative party in the Swedish parliament, has been trying to do exactly that. In recent years, they have changed their party leader and their logo in an effort to move in a more modern direction and set themselves apart. That raises the question how this change has been reflected in what they post on social media. The overall purpose of this study is to compare Facebook posts published by the Christian Democrats at two different points in time, the Swedish general elections in 2014 and in 2022. It seeks to identify how the portrayal of two different party leaders differ, respectively Göran Hägglund in 2014 and Ebba Busch in 2022. We formulate research questions targeting if and how any potential differences in the presentation of the party leader manifest. To do so, we gather six posts from each year (from the month before the election) and analyse them with a multimodal semiotic method. We employ the theories of personalisation and personal branding, drawing conclusions within the framework of social semiotics (a sub-branch of semiotics). Finally, we answer the research questions by drawing several conclusions about key differences in presentation. We find that: personalisation has increased from 2014 to 2022, that the priorities for the desired form of personal branding has changed from 2014 to 2022, and that the professionalisation of the marketing material has increased from 2014 to 2022. We argue that the study expands the research within the realm of Swedish political communication, and contributes to filling a void of longitudinal and comparative studies within that same realm.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-531891 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Golovko Hjälm, Anton, Magnusson, Elin |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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