Political Image Research Articles

Parodying incompetence in (I)europa: Hearing glide insertion and communism in a Romanian politician's speech

AbstractMy paper asks which linguistic features become enregistered to a politician's image, and how this process occurs. I examine glide insertion in the speech of former Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă and parodies of her. As parody requires exaggeration of salient features in order to be legible, I use it to investigate what is heard as salient in Dăncilă's speech. Although glide insertion is uncharacteristic of Dăncilă's speech, parodies overrepresent Dăncilă's use of the feature. To explain this, I investigate social meanings of glide insertion through metalinguistic commentary and historical memory, finding that glide insertion links Dăncilă to Romania's Communist era. Though Dăncilă rarely uses glide insertion, the feature emblematizes her political persona. Treating parodic performance as reflecting a wider listening subject, I show the listening subject's ideologies influence the enregisterment of a feature to an individual; the process by which a politician's linguistic image arises is dialogic and heavily involves listeners.

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IMAGE IN CREATING A FAVORABLE IMAGE OF UKRAINIAN POLITICIANS: ANALYSIS OF NEW YEAR'S SPEECHES

The article is dedicated to the research of the role of the language image in shaping the political image of a politician, in particular the Ukrainian President. The author focuses on the analysis of the President's New Year's addresses to the Ukrainian people as one of the markers, showing the politician's image and the main directions of their activity for the previous year and the tasks for the next year. The relevance of the study is that political technologists and consultants place one of the main emphasis on language image in building, shaping, changing the image of politics. Properly constructed language image can not only present the whole image, but also «sell» it to voters. It is because of the language aspect that the significance of discursive manipulations of the past and the future as a means of shaping political beliefs is at issue. The results of the survey revealed micro-roles (images) of Ukrainian presidents. It is stated that the Presidents adhered to these images in their New Year's addresses throughout their presidency until 2019.

СТРАТЕГИИ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ И ТРАНСЛЯЦИИ ИМИДЖА ПОЛИТИКОВ В СЕТИ ИНТЕРНЕТ

The article proposes a study of strategies for forming the image of politicians through Internet technologies. The main existing methodological approaches to studying the issues of forming a political image using modern information technologies are considered. A typology of strategies for the formation of a politician's image on the Internet is proposed, based on the priority of using the Internet. The strategies of preferential and auxiliary use of the Internet and new information technologies for the formation of the image of a politician are characterized. The strategy of the predominant use of Internet technologies for the formation of the image turns out to be the most promising for opposition politicians. Incumbents and representatives of the ruling party are interested in more diversified approaches to the formation of a political image and are using a strategy of auxiliary use of Internet resources. The degree of importance of new information technologies in solving problems of forming and promoting a political image depends, inter alia, on the political guidelines of the audience. The question of the applicability of a common typology of strategies for the formation of a political image to the process of forming a political image on the Internet is considered. The issue of measuring the effectiveness of individual strategies for the formation of a political image on the Internet remains insufficiently studied in modern science.

Реализация коннотационного потенциала метафоры при создании образа женщины-политика (на материале англоязычных СМИ)

Реализация коннотационного потенциала метафоры при создании образа женщины-политика (на материале англоязычных СМИ)

Political Branding: Political Candidates Positioning Based on Inter-Object Associative Affinity Index

The article presents the conception of positioning politicians based on a three-stage approach to political branding. The main assumption is that a political brand—and politician's image as its crucial component—is conceptualized as consisting of a node in memory to which a variety of associations are linked. These associations—positive, negative, or neutral—must be shared with other rival candidates as well as with an prototypical ideal candidate, understood as a model and standard of comparison while developing detailed marketing strategies. One of the most valuable methods that has been used to measure these associations is associative overlap technique developed by Szalay. This measure is based on free verbal associations and it expresses the degree of similarity among objects (words, persons, groups) based on the number of similar responses (associations) they elicit in common. The first stage of branding, candidates’ positioning in various segments of voters, focuses on such affinity between politicians and is based on multidimensional scaling techniques. At the second stage, mutual relationships between particular elements (positive and negative, common and distinctive), of which a politician's image consists, are defined. The third level of political branding links the results of positioning to voters’ decisions. This framework of branding political candidates is presented on the basis of empirical research focused on Polish presidential candidates’ perception and evaluation in the 2005 presidential election. The results of the performed research show that it is not only the strengthening of politicians’ positive features but also neutralizing the negative ones that contributes to his higher expected quality.

Texts (and Tweets) fromHillary: Meta‐Meming and Postfeminist Political Culture

Candidate image is a hyperreal amalgamation of image fragments generated by the politician, her/his campaign communication, news framing, and political pop culture. In the Internet age, a politician's image can be shaped by non‐elite discourses on sites such as Twitter and Tumblr. We develop a theory of the political “meta‐meme,” examining the “Texts fromHillary” Tumblr meme as framed in popular media and redeployed byHillary Clinton in her Twitter debut. The interplay between elite and quotidian discourses that comprise the “Texts fromHillary” meme and the #tweetsfromhillary meta‐meme illustrates howU.S. presidentiality is shaped by rhetorics of postfeminism.

Backward Framing and Memory Evaluation in Political Elections

Results of a backward framing study have proven the feasibility of reconstructing memories of knowledge acquired directly or indirectly by experience or by verbal description under the influence of a later-read opinion. Subjects in a study (N = 232) were initially given a description of a politician and then asked to evaluate various aspects of the candidate's image: program, personality, and physical appearance. A week later, they read a positive or negative opinion of the politician and were asked to recall their earlier evaluations. The obtained result shows that the core structure of a politician's image is based on his or her election policy, which is congruent with the economical approach to voter behavior. The recalled information of a specific event can actually be successfully manipulated by a following event, which results in subjects being convinced that their changed opinion is actually the opinion they had initially. This proves that backward framing in the constructing of political reality is a tool that can be used for creation of a false image of a politician which is imprinted in the memory of a voter.

Constructivist Mind: False Memory, Freedom, and Democracy

ABSTRACT The dynamic development of the media and the possibility of reaching every person with information create the temptation to construct a particular outlook in his or her mind. Political marketing consultants have recently taken interest in such outlook constructing, using the achievements of modern cognitive psychology to create methods of influencing voters' behavior. A number of studies on distorting a politician's image in advertising and on presenting the issue in the media according to the theory of media priming demonstrate that a citizen's freedom is in fact limited. Characteristically, in democratic countries such limitation comes from inside, by creating in a voter's mind a certain picture of some part of reality stimulating her or him toward expected behaviors. Market mechanisms, which allow for the control of information reaching different segments of voters, lead to a situation in which absolute freedom in creating and broadcasting political advertisements does not contribute to the freedom of expressing political ideas but limits this freedom. Modern studies on the perception and remembering of political advertisements show that the goal of such advertisements is inconsistent with the classical notion of freedom and democracy according to which they should facilitate conscious discussion and voters' critical reflection.

Advertising and the Image of Politicians in Evolving and Established Democracies

The article1 analyzes the constructivist and realist approaches to research on voting behavior in presidential elections in evolving (Poland) and established (U.S.) democracies. The influence of a politician's image on affective attitudes toward the candidate is stressed in the first approach; the other approach stresses the role of affect in forming such an image. Using experimental data from the 2000 presidential elections in each country, the research applied structural equation modeling and multiple regression analysis to show the best way to use image construction to influence voting behavior and, in the realist approach, the key role of affects as the starting point for designing and creating politicans' images. The results of the research also show that Polish and American voters perceive slightly differently the socio-political reality created by the media, but in both countries political advertising plays an important role in creating political images.

Role of Advertising in Forming the Image of Politicians: Comparative Analysis of Poland, France, and Germany

This article presents an analysis of the influence of political advertisements on forming the image of politicians and the voting behavior of citizens. The very important issues are attitude to the candidates and estimation of their personal qualities. After a critical analysis of current models of the influence of political advertisements on the voters, the authors derived the sequential model of the influence of political advertisement on voting behavior. Experiments in three countries were conducted in order to verify this model: Poland (1995 presidential election), France (presidential elections in 1995), and Germany (general election in 1994). The results confirm the dependencies described in the model. The results also allow for distinguishing three types of impact that political advertisements may have on voting decisions: (1) strengthening former voting preferences; (2) weakening the former preferences and their change or reverse in an extreme case; and (3) lack of impact or small fluctuations in voting preferences accompanied by simultaneous reconfiguration of a politician's image in the voters' minds (or reargumentation as far as the motives of one's decision are concerned). The results obtained in the research also allow for deriving a number of practical clues concerning the possibilities of making more efficient political ads.

Propagande expression roi, image idole oracle

Paul Veyne, Propaganda Expression King, Image Idol Oracle. ? The author, a native from the group of antiquarian scholars, shows : that images are not a language, and iconology is not a whole, for what counts is the decorative ; that monarchic pomp and imagery are not propaganda but expression ; that the decor of churches has never been a bible for the illiterate ; that Greek statues are idols but three other things too ; that we hardly look at works of art, the ? ideal spectator ? being both the rule and the exception ; and that poli tical images do not symbolize power but express a self-evident legitimacy ; for there is legiti macy whenever one can manipulate it while believing that one is submitting to it, as is also done with oracles. For colleagues on antiquity, it should be added that much thought is given to the fact that the sculptures on Trajan's column were not visible ; and a stylistic interpretation is proposed of late decorations on Constantine's Arch.