Visual rhetoric and the analysis of persuasive political communication

Abstract

Chapter 1: Although political argumentation is often assumed to be predominantly verbal in its expression, the use of visuals in persuasive political communication has been increasingly understood as a powerful strategic component. From the basic choices of party emblems and colour schemes through to the complex narratives compressed into political cartoons, election advertising, rally paraphernalia, candidate 'imagery', and social media memes, visual devices have long been used to help bolster verbal arguments and, increasingly, are serving as complete argument packets in larger campaigns. Nonverbal communication has been shown to have significant effects on the reception of political messages but remains notably understudied (Dumitrescu, 2016). Perhaps because of their association with emotional reaction and propaganda efforts rather than rational deliberative argumentation, visuals are still often treated suspiciously or dismissively by political commentators and scholars (Hoffman, 2011). Interestingly, a similar reluctance to address the contributing power of imagery to persuasion beset the study of rhetoric until the later part of the twentieth century. Since the 1990s, however, a large amount of rhetorical scholarship has taken up the challenge of redressing the verbal dominance of the rhetorical tradition with explorations of the visual. As one of the primary thinkers of the resulting field of visual rhetoric, Sonja K. Foss (1995), puts it, "although rhetorical critics may feel nostalgia for a culture in which public discourse had primary impact, they are recognizing that to confine their study of symbols to speech making is to miss a great many of the symbols that affect us daily" (p. 213). Given the many ways in which political communication and rhetoric are so closely intertwined (Martin, 2014), the move towards generating a sophisticated understanding of how the visual impacts political communication can gain much from the field of visual rhetoric. In this chapter we will first consider the essential elements of the rhetorical approach to persuasion and the ways in which they interact with the traditions and practices of political communication. We will then examine the different perspectives that rhetorical scholarship has adopted in order to integrate the visual into the verbal consideration of persuasion, examining how they can be used to illuminate the political use of imagery. The chapter finishes with two contrasting case studies – the first a study of the surprisingly similar visual rhetoric embedded in the UK's Labour and Conservative parties' websites and the second an analysis of the apparently absurdist imagery recruited by groups surrounding the extremist Boogaloo movement in the US.