Communicative and Persuasive Strategies in the Bulgarian Parliamentary Elections 2014

Abstract

The field of political communication has long cast its eye on the Internet and beyond its traditional US-American focus. Nevertheless, research into the Web's full palette of expression means as well as across a wider, non-Western territory, remains modest. This paper analyzes how five major Bulgarian political parties presented themselves on the Web in one of the most heated and controversial elections since the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989/1990. To shine a light on Bulgarian political communication, the paper takes the October 2014 parliamentary election campaign in Bulgaria, which took place amid unprecedented society-wide discontent and tension. It takes a close look at five major parties' online platforms. It applies a multimodal content-analytical framework to a total of N=64 webpages. Distinct visual, textual, and multimodal persuasive strategies flesh out, and their relationships to each party's background and poll performance are explored.