Making Sense of Political Images on Instagram: Analysing the Online Image and Impression Management of World Leaders versus Belgian Politicians. A Comparison of Two Case Studies

Abstract

For the past decade, informality seems to be playing an increasing role in the branding strategies of politicians around the world. Ongoing individualization and privatization have encouraged candidates to share personal pictures of themselves on social media platforms, highlighting the human side behind the leader. Although visuals are omnipresent in digital media, little is known about how people interact and engage with the presented content. Perception politics and impression management techniques can help to create a favourable public persona (Diedkova, De Landtsheer & De Vries, 2019) – in this case through an Instagram post. Drawing on the perception politics management framework, which postulates that a more serious and formal presentation of a political candidate leads to higher support and an elevated perception of political suitability for candidates, it is assumed that the presence of formal attributes on a post has a positive effect on engagement. In order to explore voter’s perception of political suitability, a comprehensive visual analysis was repeated within two different geographical contexts: 1) Belgian politicians and parties and 2) world leaders. Data was collected via a real-time object detection program called ‘You Only Look Once’ in the programming language Python. The results indicate that – though one might expect that political communication should adhere to the informal character of social media to garner more voter engagement – the image that resonates best with the voter is a formal one – similar to the pre-social media age.