23 Wahl- und Abstimmungsplakate

Abstract

Election and vote posters are traditional formats of political advertising. Ever since there has been competition for the favour of voters, posters have been used to make the positions, programmes and people of the advertising parties or political groups known to the population. Even today, election and vote posters have lost none of their importance and political parties/groups cannot and will not do without them as a means of persuasion. As a text type which is subject to certain space-time restrictions, those posters exhibit specific characteristics. The prototypical election/vote poster is perceived visually, whereby the direction of communication is unidirectional and monological, i.e. an interaction in the sense of a dialogue is not intended. Both election posters and vote posters have two primary objectives as appellative text types: a) to mobilize citizens (movere) to participate in the election or vote and b) to trigger and to enforce certain convictions and/or actions. Various rhetorical means are used for this purpose, which are linked to different sign modalities (script and image) and their interplay. The resulting multimodal poster rhetoric is the subject of this article.