Electoral Discourse Research Articles

Beyond Words: Semiotic Strategies in Indonesian Presidential Campaign Posters

This article investigates the semiotic strategies employed in Indonesian presidential campaign posters, utilizing semiotics as a powerful tool to decode symbols and signs in political communication. The study focuses on the verbal and visual aspects of the posters, aiming to uncover their intended meaning, myth, and ideologies. Through a comprehensive analysis of the visual elements, symbols, and textual cues, the research examines the semiotic strategies employed to convey messages and influence voter perceptions. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of semiotics and political communication, the findings reveal how subtle visual and textual choices shape the interpretation and reception of political messages. The implications extend beyond this specific campaign, offering valuable insights for future electoral discourse and visual communication strategies. Understanding the semiotic strategies in political campaigning enhances our comprehension of the complex dynamics of political communication, facilitating a more nuanced understanding of how political messages are constructed and perceived. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of semiotics in political communication and provides a foundation for further research in the field.

Bread-and-Butter Politics: Arrested Liberalization and Hegemonic Materialism in Singapore

ABSTRACT Singapore has displayed a continued ability to confound the assumed symbiotic relationships between democratization, economic growth, and liberalism. This paper historicizes the development, use, and understanding of a popular idiom frequently employed in Singaporean electoral discourse – “bread-and-butter” – to explore the relationship between hegemonic discourses, social attitudes, and political contestation in Singapore. Doing so reveals a complex pattern of the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) ideological-discursive legwork: bread-and-butter issues are discursively constituted around a set of core economic issues and demarcated as the key political concerns of voters, while calls for more liberal or progressive changes in society are bracketed within the sphere of postmaterialist values. By seeking to maintain the hegemonic notion of the party as the guarantor of basic material goods, PAP sets the terms of competition in electoral politics to issues that are its perceived strengths. The party’s continued ability to provide economic goods contributes to its political success, stalling the growth of liberalization and a more competitive political landscape in Singapore. Bread-and-butter discourse therefore reflects and reproduces the preeminence of materialism in Singapore’s politics.

Персуазивная роль этнонимов в испанском электоральном дискурсе

The article examines the persuasive impact of ethnonyms and ethnic categories on the voters in Spanish electoral discourse. In the modern world, the mechanisms of political communication are generating a growing interest. It is explained by the influence of political processes on all spheres of society, the fate of peoples and entire states, and the interests of every citizen. Therefore, political problems remain relevant at all times. The important role of electoral discourse, which has a pronounced persuasive effect on the voters, should be highlighted. When struggling for power, leaders and representatives of Spanish political parties, naturally, strive to establish trust, exert a certain emotional impact on potential voters and induce them to make the “correct” electoral decision, i.e. to vote for their party. It should be noted that persuasiveness has not only an argumentative, but also a manipulative component, forcing an addressee to act in the interests of the sender of the message. One of the persuasive speech mechanisms of Spanish electoral discourse is the use of ethnonyms in the election programmes of political parties. Ethnonyms contain valuable historical, ethnographic, cultural and linguistic information and, accordingly, cover the religious, cultural and historical spheres, as well as play an important role in intercultural communication. Ethnic identity includes the desire of peoples to preserve their identity, the uniqueness of their culture, language and worldview. Ethnonyms allow native speakers to identify their own traits and stereotypes. The essence of cultural, spiritual and political life is revealed through language. Thus, the study of ethnonyms and ethnic categories, as well as their functions in political discourse, is an urgent task of modern linguistics.

Religious othering in Nigeria’s electoral discourse: Towards a critical religious tolerance

Religion is a main characteristic of Nigerian identity and influences the algorithm of its public life. The study explores online religious othering in Nigeria’s electoral discourse. The study utilises a critical discourse analytic approach and examines a dataset of over 14,000 Facebook comments from Nigerians from different religious groups. The analysis revealed that religious othering in the electoral discourse was indexed using three major strategies, namely: demonisation, ingroup ostracisation and stereotyping. The study demonstrates, among others, an emergent intra-religious discord in the online electoral discourse, mainly among the Christian group. Members who displayed favouritism to an outgroup cause, in this case, the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket, are framed as Other. They are denied the membership of being a Christian. The study concludes with imperative advocacy for the cultivation of critical religious tolerance, a model and practice for engendering a respectful and inclusive political environment beyond religious affiliations.

Potential of Digital Technologies in Election Campaigns

Currently, the active introduction of digital technologies into the field of political communication has led to a transformation of electoral discourse structure. Big data analysis techniques are widely used at the preparation stage to identify the target electorate; at the communication stage, machine learning technology helps to pinpoint fakes and monitor the media, and neural networks create campaign content. Digital technologies enable actors in the political process to communicate with the electorate through channels independent of mainstream traditional media, densify the information environment and contribute to the creation of a unique digital scenography that produces a powerful emotional impact on the electorate. The article examines the most active period of the election campaign, when the candidate is in direct contact with the electorate, and digital technologies enhance the degree of his/her influence on potential voters. It is shown that the choice of digital technologies depends, to a large extent, on the political culture of the country. The cases of election campaigns in the USA, France, India and South Korea are considered.

Ethnic othering in Nigeria’s electoral discourse: the need for intercultural competence

ABSTRACT This study examines online ethnic othering during Nigeria's 2023 general elections. The study employs a critical discourse analytic (CDA) framework and utilises a corpus of 7678 Facebook comments from Nigerians. The analysis reveals that individuals from the Yoruba ethnic group stereotype the Igbo people by questioning their legitimacy and voting rights as residents in Yoruba lands, especially Lagos. This stereotype is perpetuated through the legitimation strategy of historicising ethnic politics, which justifies ethnic prejudices. The study concludes with a call for intercultural competence, which is crucial in promoting respect for diversity, human rights, and inter-ethnic differences.

Defining Hate Speech in Electoral Discourse: Legal Challenges and Framework in India

Defining Hate Speech in Electoral Discourse: Legal Challenges and Framework in India

Elements of Fake News in the 2022 General Elections in Kenya

This article discusses the manifestation of fake news in Kenya’s last general election based on a study of audio-visual content that was shared between June and December, 2022. It identifies the use of audio-visual content as fake news in the 2022 Kenyan general elections; identifies the themes of the audio-visual content used in Kenya’s 2022 general elections and analyzes the impact it had on the electoral discourse in the country. It is from this that it identifies gaps and gives recommendations including those on policy and hopes to contribute to scholarship on fake news whose interest among stakeholders keeps on growing. One of these recommendations is to teach fact-checking as a general course in institutions of higher learning. This should not be focused on journalists alone since everyone has the ability to create fake news content or to become its victim.

Strategic Campaign Communication: Evidence from 30,000 Candidate Manifestos

Abstract Politicians seeking to persuade voters may not always be able to say what they would like to say. Adopting policy positions opposite to that of their party or contradicting their previous policy announcements may be costly. I use computational text analysis on 30,000 candidate manifestos from two-round French elections to show that politicians take these costs into account, by toeing the party line and sticking to their platform, while also strategically adjusting their campaign communication and advertising neutral non-policy issues when they need to reach a broader electorate. I provide suggestive evidence that this moderation of electoral discourse predicts better performance in office and may therefore provide valuable information to voters.

The Fulfilment of Election Pledges in India

The central idea of promissory representation is that parties make promises to voters during election campaigns and then fulfil those promises after elections if they have the power to do so. Until now, most comparative research on the making, breaking, and keeping of parties’ campaign promises, or “election pledges,” has considered Western democracies. The present study examines pledge fulfilment in India, focusing on pledges made by the two main Indian parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress at the 2009 and 2014 national parliamentary elections. The evidence indicates that election pledges are prominent parts of electoral discourse and policymaking in India, as they are in Western countries. However, the form of pledge making and keeping is characterised by the distinctive features of Indian politics, notably the prevalence of valence politics on socio-economic issues and identity politics on issues relating to religion, castes and tribes, and gender.

Engaging youth for positive change: A mixed methods evaluation of site level program implementation & outcomes

This convergent, mixed-methods research presents a site-level assessment of a civic engagement program geared towards middle and high school students (i.e. young people). In Illinois, a majority of young adults (ages 18–29) report discussing sociopolitical issues with friends and family, mimicking national trends. Simultaneously, approximately one in four young people in Illinois physically voted in 2018 elections, and less than 10% reported contacting or visiting public officials. These discrepancies allude to the importance of empowering younger people to engage actively in civic and electoral discourse and processes as a means to improving their communities. Engaging Youth for Positive Change (EYPC) is one example of a civic engagement program for adolescents and young people in the United States. The curriculum guides middle and high school aged people through civic processes including adopting local ordinances by working with city councils or other governing bodies. Researchers collected site level data from EYPC implementation sites (N = 122) across Illinois and there were significant correlations between outcome scores and both number of activities implemented and implementation indices. This manuscript delineates site level aspects of EYPC in detail—including quantitative and qualitative findings from site-level analyses—and discusses implications regarding how EYPC and similar programs may promote civic engagement among youth and young adult populations.

Vox and journalistic information: use and criticism of the media in the 2019 General Election campaigns

The general elections held in 2019 gave Vox enough votes to enter the Spanish Parliament as the third most popular political party. The growing role of this radical right-wing party has revealed a complex relationship with the media. The objective of this study is to characterise the relationship between Vox and the media by analysing the party's electoral discourse using quantitative techniques – posts made on Facebook and Twitter (n = 224) – and qualitative techniques, exploring the framing used in the closing rallies of the campaign. References to the media dominated the messages Vox posted on Twitter during the November campaign, whose main purpose was to repost content previously broadcast in traditional media. However, almost one in four of the messages were also critical of at least one media outlet, which also occurred at rallies. The institutionalisation of Vox entails a growing mediatisation of its discourse.

The varying logics for supporting populist right-wing welfare politics in West European welfare regimes

AbstractLittle is known about whether and under which conditions populist radical right parties’ (PRRPs’) nativist welfare politics matters to the voters. I address this gap in the research and test the argument that the electoral appeal of this electoral discourse varies among welfare regimes. The study compares the conservative and social-democratic welfare regimes and focuses on the vote choices of the two core constituencies of PRRPs – economically exposed and immigration-sceptic voters. The results show that these electorates support PRRPs’ nativist welfare positions for very different reasons in the two welfare regimes. First, in the conservative regime, economically exposed citizens vote for PRRPs, the more they stress nativism and welfare expansion. By contrast, in the social-democratic regime this group of voters is more likely to support positions combining nativism and dismantled welfare benefits. Second, immigrant-sceptic voters in the social-democratic regime support PRRPs who pledge to preserve the welfare state, and increased migration considerably boosts the probability that they do so. By contrast, this group of voters in the conservative regime is more likely to support PRRPs who seek to partly dismantle the welfare state, and the inflow of immigrants is unrelated to these choices. These results have important implications and suggest that welfare regimes moderate public opinion differently in the current age of populism compared to previous eras.

Актуальные тенденции протекания электоральных процессов в государствах ЕС в условиях содержательной трансформации электоральных ожиданий

The article presents a retrospective analysis of trends in the course of electoral processes in the EU states, taking into account the substantial correction of the electoral discourse caused by a shift in emphasis in electoral requests and expectations. The authors pay special attention to the consideration of the pre-election discourse of Germany in the period 2017–2021.

Electoral discourse: women as represented by Russian and Colombian mass media

The authors analyse the linguistic strategies modern mass media use when writing about female politicians. Comparison of media discourses in Colombian and Russian media is made by means of interpretive, contextual. discourse and content analysis. The main aim of the study is to identify how the mass media view the role of women in politics and to what extent it is affected by the culture and mentality of the society of a given country. Based on Western European research, three linguistic strategies used by the mass media in the field of “women in politics” were dealt with. As a result of comparing Russian and Columbian media discourses the intensive use of these three strategies in the mass media discourse was identified. Exclusion strategy means that the political power that women have is delegated to them (by men). Invisibility strategy implies the use of a metaphor or catachreza (trope or stylistic error, incorrect or unusual use of word combinations with incompatible literal lexical meanings). The presence of a man as the main co-hero is a determining factor or an integral reference to the political activities of women. Caricature strategy implies description of political actions of women satirically, as caricature, as a ridiculous imitation. Ridicule, derogatory forms of address (derived from one's own name or a diminutive form of a name, reflecting the logic of underestimation) lead to a decline in status. The current media discourse broadcasts the idea that women in politics are isolated cases, exceptions, explained primarily by their personal, political or professional relations with men. Descriptions of women's political activities is full of with stereotypes, prejudices and preconceived notions. Colombian media discourse shows a steady trend towards the use of puns in the linguistic representation of women politicians while Russian mass media tend to use caricature strategies in positioning women in politics. The media discourse of both countries predominantly views women as actors in politics, as subjects that, by their very nature, cannot belong to politics.

Атрибутивные дефисные композиты в электоральном речетворчестве американских СМИ: соотношение объективной и прагматической причинности

The article discusses a two-level causal analysis of the attributive composite formation in the US electoral speech creativity. The research material included attributive hyphenated composites from American mass media sources that covered the US election campaigns of 2016 and 2020. The research methodology integrates the approaches of the functional word formation and morphopragmatics, which focus on the problems of wordproduction in real communication, in live speech, in context, and in discourse. It was proved that the occurrence of attributive hyphenated composites in the electoral discourse of American media could be the result of both objective and pragmatic factors. Objective causality lies in the diachronic typological constants of the English language, the ontological conditionality of the nomination by the hyphen complex, and in the features of modern communication. The reasons for the “contraction” of the polylexemic construction into a functional and structural-semantic whole should be sought in the spiral (bidirectional) model of analytic development of the English language, which was associated with semantic compression, “contraction” and inter-level rearrangement at each new turn. The continuous formation of hyphenated composites is the result of a typologically relevant dialectical interaction between analytic discreteness and a new analogical synthesis. Objective factors include, as well the properties of modern verbal communication with its tendency to spatial-temporal compression, the tendency to thicken and condense information. Pragmatic factors are realized on the basis of objective ones and are expressed in the pragmatically-appropriate compression techniques. Different types of compressive linguistic experimentation are in demand, including “continuum” units that border between different language levels. Attributive hyphenated composites represent the transition “lexeme - syntactic construction” in the structural aspect, and “lexeme - text” in the content aspect, being the content “staplers” of the entire US electoral macrodiscourse. An attributive hyphenated composite with a “language creativity charge” is a technique for realizing the persuasive potential of electoral discourse. The conciseness of hyphenated composites and their ability to convey many pragmatic meanings in a “condensed” form is considered as a manifestation of linguistic creative activity and increasing information capacity.

Group Nominations as an Instrument of Electoral Struggle: Ukrainian Discourse of 2019 Parliamentary Elections

The authors work within the framework of political sociology using interdisciplinary methodology. The article presents the results of a sociological analysis of the functions of group nominations in the electoral struggle in divided societies. The empirical basis of the article is the author's study of the electoral discourse based on the material of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine in 2019, carried out within the framework of the ARDU international research project, as well as a mass poll conducted within the framework of the same project. The authors investigate the electoral struggle as a factor and s reflection of macrosocial processes, relying on a combined theoretical and metho­dological foundation: the sociology of cleavages, social constructivism, and critical discourse analysis. The results of the analysis of the pre-election discourse and a mass survey of the adult population of Ukraine show the relationship between discursive group nominations and objective social cleavages. The division of society into conflict groups is used as a discursive tool for segmentation of the electoral audience, as well as for the consolidation and deepening of existing social divisions. Authors conclude that there is the interrelation between discursive group nominations and objective social cleavages. Group nominations (re) produce a macrosocial split of a complex, regional and ideological nature, which receives a technological dimension in the electoral discourse.

Le discours électoral : entre transversalité et frontières génériques

The electoral speech appears as an asserted genre of political discourse with its own defining criteria. However there are speeches that are hardly part of an electoral context, but which carry relevant criteria of power conquest speeches. Our analysis of former Ivorian Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly’s speech on the occasion of the Gôh region’s day of tribute to President Alassane Ouattara is intended to challenge some defining features and thus, the generic boundaries of electoral discourse.

Authority-Based Strategy of (De)legitimization in American Electoral Discourse: A Case Study

The paper presents an analysis of (de)legitimization in American pre-election discourse based on the tactics of appealing to “authorities”, any entity, person or value which continue to retain confidence, have credibility or are otherwise entitled to authority in the society and family. Sixty 2020 election campaign speeches of U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden and U.S. vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris were the material of this case study. Our research approach is based on theoretical and methodological findings of linguopersonology and political linguistics. The main methods used are those of intent, semantic and stylistic analysis. The purpose was to identify, describe and categorize the authorities cited by the two politicians during their campaign and to correlate them to voters’ aspirations in the cities and states involved. The analysis of relevant contexts revealed that the choice of authorities is primarily guided by the expectations of target groups of voters to whom the campaign speech is addressed. For this reason, the pre-election discourse of the politicians under study includes the authorities which are important for different target groups of voters addressed all over the country. The study of the American pre-election discourse yields a general classification of authorities to which both politicians are appealing; it includes famous politicians, public figures, renowned experts, scientists, outstanding representatives of the culture and art. The politicians may also appeal to the authority of the speaker himself, their parents (mom, dad); edifying example of ordinary people (not celebrities); authority of high positions; authority of institutions and bodies; authority of universal values; authority of different kinds of texts (reports, laws, Scriptures), and sometimes authority of some mass media sources. The multiplicity of the authorities represented in our classification is explained in the paper as a logical consequence of addresser-addressee interaction. It also reeals the important role of the politician’s personality to appeal at a rally to “authorities” that might in his opinion be attractive for his specific audience. The paper presents the results of the analysis of the linguistic features of the appeal-to-authority tactics.

Concepts People and Power in Russian and Spanish Electoral Discourse

Political communication becomes particularly intense in the pre-election period. Democracy receives criticism aimed to protect the interests of citizens. It is political parties that are responsible for a constructive discussion of their positions and motivating citizens to participate in the election campaign. Te electoral language is usually an emotional, connotative language, which resonates with citizens. Political electoral discourse is characterized by certain basic concepts, such as “politics”, “election”, “electoral programs”, “electorate”, “people”, “power” and others. “People” and “power” are the key ones, since they reflect the features of political process and are inextricably linked to each other during all electoral period. Tis article focuses on the study of the people / power opposition in the Russian and Spanish electoral discourse and identifes conceptual structures and signs of these concepts.