When visual communication fosters leaders' exceptional and ordinary image: the Salvini case

Abstract

Chapter 16: Nowadays political leaders face with a "paradox" that affects contemporary democratic leadership (Kane and Patapan 2012): on the one hand, they have to appear as strong statesmen, in possession of exceptional skills that gave them the authority to rule the people. On the other hand, they are allowed to rule by the people, they have to appear similar and close to common people (Wood et al. 2016). Such paradox is certainly accentuated in our era which is increasingly characterised by the media and by a corresponding increase of the so called "anti-political sentiment" (Campus 2006; Boswell and Corbett 2015), namely a strong decline of trust in world politics. Through this study, we analyse how the leader of the right-populist "League Party", Matteo Salvini, aims to solve the aforementioned paradox. The main goal of our study is to answer to the follow question: "what kind of leadership is improved by Salvini in order to maintain his consensus?". Many studies focused on politicians' leadership style are based on the message that they diffuse thorough discourses and declaration. In our study, we will deal with the phenomenon by a different point of view, analyzing the pictures that Salvini publishes on his personal Facebook profile. Previous studies demonstrate that images are more memorable, garner more attention, and stimulate more emotive responses than other types of messages (Munoz and Towner 2017). However, we know little on how leaders utilize images in "self-presentation" on social media sites. Our main hypothesis is that Salvini faces the "paradox of democratic leader" thorough a strategic use of his "political body". In particular, he is able in mixing the features of a "super leader" with the ones of an "ordinary person", appearing as authentic and normal as possible. In recent years, several scholars (Kreis 2018; Achen and Bartels 2016) have advanced a new understanding of democracy in primarily identity-based terms: they argued that citizens vote is based on social identities, more than on policy proposals. Salvini is able in identifying himself with the community he wants to represent thorough a strategic use of images, wearing a peculiar type of clothes and appearing with particular categories of people. Our methodology implies a mixed approach between qualitative and quantitative analysis. We will analyze, quantitatively, the number of images published on Facebook during six months of analysis. We will also qualitatively analyze the main features and the most recurrent symbols in his pictures, in order to understand what kind of leadership he exhibits on Facebook. For the qualitative analysis, we will mostly rely on the framework developed by Stanyer (2013) about the three domains of the process of intimization of politics through which pieces of personal information are circulated: a) the individual domain, b) the domain of relationships and c) the spatial domain. We choose to analyse Facebook instead of other more image-oriented platforms because it is the most widespread social medium with an impressive diffusion at the mass-level across age and gender. It is the most used social medium worldwide and it can count on a much more varied audience than all the other social media.