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Visual Communication in Election Campaigns

Article · January 2011

DOI: 10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v01i03/44209

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T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L

JOURNAL
of THE IMAGE

Volume 1

Visual Communication in Election Campaigns: An

Analysis of Election Posters in the 2008 Austrian
National Election Campaign

Lore Hayek

www.OnTheImage.com
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE
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First published in 2011 in Champaign, Illinois, USA

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Visual Communication in Election Campaigns: An
Analysis of Election Posters in the 2008 Austrian
National Election Campaign
Lore Hayek, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Abstract: In Political Communication, “paid media” is what denotes that part of campaign communic-
ation that parties can use to address their potential voters in an unmediated and controlled way.
Election posters, newspaper advertisements and the like account for a major part of Austrian parties’
campaign budget. However, while a lot of content analytical research has been done on media content
regarding campaigns, not a single (quantitative) study has strived to analyze the issue or campaign
related content of election posters or the degree of personalization of party posters. Another important
element is the consistency within a poster, regarding both textual and visual elements. The aim of this
research project is to develop an analytical framework that subsequently can be adapted to analyze
further campaigns and allow for effects of time and other influences.

Keywords: Political Communication, Election Campaign, Austria

Introduction

P
OLITICAL ADVERTISING IN Austria is different from campaigning in most
other countries. Other than in many other democracies, particularly the United States,
political advertisers in Austria do not utilize TV and radio as their main media, but
stick to more conventional means, such as posters and newspaper advertisements.
Posters account for up to 40% of Austrian parties’ campaign budget. (e.g. Extradienst 2010)
Therefore, they not only serve as a classical means of advertising, but also become the centre
of attention and media coverage themselves. As opposed to political communication via the
media, parties can exercise full control on the content of their advertisements. Parties can
not only control the messages they want to convey, but also the design and visual content
of their posters.
This paper elaborates on two aspects of visual communication in election campaigns:
Personalization and Image-Text relations.
Personalization refers to the degree to which the message a poster conveys centres on one
single person rather than on a collective actor or an issue. Image-Text relations refer to the
effective and entangled use of both images and text in designing an election poster.

Political Advertising in General and in Austria

One of the most accurate definitions of political Advertising has been put forward by Günther
Bentele (1998). He states that Political Advertising paradigmatically appears during election
campaigns, primarily consists of one way communication and uses linguistic elements such
as slogans and medial instruments such as posters, advertisements, radio- and TV spots,

The International Journal of the Image

Volume 1, 2011, http://ontheimage.com/journal/, ISSN 2152-7857
© Common Ground, Lore Hayek, All Rights Reserved, Permissions:
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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

stickers, and folders which display logos, names and photos of parties and candidates.
(Bentele 1998, 131)
The aims and effects of political advertising are the centre of numerous theoretical and
empirical scholarly pieces. Already in 1976, in a paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly,
Atkin and Heald describe possible effects of political advertising and also account for the
difficulties in measuring these effects: Political advertising can (1) increase the knowledge
voters have about parties and candidates, (2) emphasize certain issues, (3) arouse interest,
(4) initiate more positive emotions towards the candidate and (5) polarize. Nevertheless it
must be recognized that these consequences of advertising occur within the context of other
mass media and interpersonal message inputs, and that political orientations held or learned
by the voter probably exert a reciprocal influence in producing exposure to broadcast ad-
vertising. (Atkin und Heald 1976)
The term „visual communication in election campaigns” („visuelle Wahlkampfkommunika-
tion”) has only been used in German literature since the early 1990s. Until then, visual
communication was seen as entertaining attachment to the campaign that did not have any
influence on the vote share though. (Müller 2003)
According to the Austrian Democracy Center Vienna (Demokratiezentrum Wien), there
are three main functions to election posters. Firstly, they announce the approach of elections
(activation function). Secondly, they are a means to motivate members of the own party and
discourage political opponents (identification function). And thirdly, they are used to further
emphasize the party’s main messages (intensification function). (Wirth 2006)
In one of their numerous contributions on the subject, Kaid and Holtz-Bacha (2008)
identify four possible effects of political advertising: Firstly, to inform the public about
parties and candidates; secondly, to publicly rate the parties and candidates; thirdly, to influ-
ence voters’ voting decisions; and finally, to provide an unfiltered platform for negative
campaigning. (Kaid und Holtz-Bacha 2008, 564f)
Other than in other western democracies, Austrian campaigns still put a lot of effort into
poster campaigning. Figures show that after television news coverage, posters are the second
largest campaign tool with a range of 87 per cent. Additionally, they are present over a much
longer period of time than all other means of advertising such as TV and radio spots. This
is of course due to the fact that since 1995, parties are not allowed air time on public television
anymore and ranges of private TV stations are negligible. (see Lederer 2010)

Research Questions and Hypotheses

To what extent are election posters personalized? What determines the degree of personaliz-
ation?
Hypotheses:

• Vote share: Smaller parties which have no chance to nominate the prime minister will
have less personalized posters than those parties who actually compete for government.
• Closeness to election: Posters that are affixed closer to the election tend to be more per-
sonalized than those which are affixed earlier on.

Are parties consistent in their communication concerning the messages they deliver verbally
and the messages they transport visually?
 LORE HAYEK

Hypothesis:

• Parties tend to use text rather than visuals to illustrate their message.

Personalization
The process of personalization has been intensifying in political communication in general
as well as in political advertising in particular. There are several reasons for this shift from
issues or parties being the main content of advertising to the focus on single (leading) persons.
Increased personalization reduces complexity – messages are easier to convey and understand
if they are attributed to one single person. Furthermore, personalization comes hand in hand
with a tendency to emotionalization. Political communication strategies tend to employ
emotions rather than issue positions to transport their messages. And it is obviously more
facile to attach emotions like hope, fear, national pride etc to a single candidate than to a
party body. Lastly, personalization is also being used to attract attention. The focus on one
single candidate not only allows for the communication of party positions, but also to use
traits like character or personal life as a campaign instrument. (see also Podschuweit und
Dahlem 2007) The communication scientist Christina Holtz-Bacha puts it like this: “For
everyone involved in the political process, politics is easier to understand and convey through
a person.” (Holtz-Bacha 2002)

Image-text Relations
The field of studying (still) visual images in political communication has not been worked
on very extensively yet. Schweiger and Adami (1999) for example look into the nonverbal
appearance of politicians and parties. They especially focus on the fact that visual information
can be stored much faster, longer and better than textual information. Therefore, the visual
presentation of parties and candidates must not be underestimated.
Pictures have an information value that can very easily be overlooked. Accordingly, pictures
in an advertisement are fixed and stored prior to words. The activating potential of pictures
can be created by means of its contents or design elements and can be controlled and dosed
relatively well, as compared to text elements. The activation of pictures stimulates the pro-
cessing of information. Furthermore, a person has a nearly unlimited capacity for the reception
of imagery information. The extent of imaginative material that can be received and stored
by far exceeds the capacity for the reception and storage of cognitive information. The more
concrete and pictorial information is designed, the better it can be remembered. According
to the theory of dual coding, pictures can more or less replace verbal information. (see Sch-
weiger und Adami 1999, 356)

Methodological Approach
The objects of investigation are the election posters distributed during the fall 2008 election
campaign.
There were 10 parties competing nationwide, five of which managed to secure seats in
parliament (*) : SPÖ* (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, Social Democratic Party),
ÖVP* (Österreichische Volkspartei, Austrian Peoples Party), FPÖ* (Freiheitliche Partei
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

Österreichs, Freedom Party), Die Grünen* (The Greens), BZÖ* (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich,
Alliance for the Future of Austria), Liberales Forum (Liberal Forum), Bürgerforum Österreich
(Citizens’ Forum), KPÖ (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs, Communist Party), Die Christen
(The Christians), Rettet Österreich (Save Austria). None of the latter five gained more than
2 per cent and therefore they all failed to surpass the 4 per cent threshold to enter parliament.1
Depending on their size and campaign budget, parties placarded in one, two or even three
waves during the last four weeks before Election Day. Only Rettet Österreich did not use
any election posters for financial reasons. Overall, around 70 different posters were affixed
in the campaigns.
The posters were analyzed using quantitative content analysis, including some elements
from visual analysis. Using a coding scheme developed specifically for this study, posters
were coded in two large blocks of variables – consistency and personalization.

The 2008 Elections

The 2008 elections resulted from a coalition breakup that occurred in June and led to early
elections being called in September. The campaign therefore was a rather short one and
centred on the last four weeks prior to Election Day.
The Social Democrats, being the governing party, mainly focused on promoting the
qualities and abilities of their new front runner, Werner Faymann. Furthermore, they put the
finger on the fact that the ÖVP had been responsible for the coalition breakup and they
themselves were the warrantors of a more stable government.

Figure 1: Election Poster SPÖ, “Enough with Fighting” 2 All Posters have been Obtained
from the Austrian National Library’s Poster Archive at http://plakatarchivaustria.onb.ac.at/
or from the respective parties’ own archives

The ÖVP, on the other hand, ran a campaign that had a clear focus on policy issues, mainly
promoting classic family values and lowering taxes. Their front runner Wilhelm Molterer

1
Full election results (in German) can be found on the Ministry of the Interior’s web site at ht-
tp://www.bmi.gv.at/cms/BMI_wahlen/nationalrat/2008/End_Gesamt.aspx
 LORE HAYEK

was not present in the campaign until a week before Election Day as he was not perceived
as being extremely popular.

Figure 2: Election Poster ÖVP “We Ensure that Performance Pays off. Lower Taxes!”

The Green Party campaign concentrated mainly on meta-attributes rather than policy issues.
Featuring long-time front runner Alexander van der Bellen, their posters put forward a harsh
critique of government’s performance, along with an accentuation of their own credibility.

Figure 3: Election Poster GRÜNE “Endless Hassle? Not with Me.”

With their campaign, the FPÖ continued a year-long tradition. Totally centred on their
leader Heinz-Christian Strache, their campaign revolves around the issues of national identity
and anti-immigration.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

Figure 4: Election Poster FPÖ “Now it is about US Austrians. Therefore FPÖ.”

Finally, the BZÖ, being the youngest party in parliament, tried to drag full attention to its
front runner, the well-known right wing populist Jörg Haider. However, as opposed to the
nationalistic campaigns Haider had run earlier, this time he was presented as an “elder
statesman” willing to take responsibility for the country.

Figure 5: Election Poster BZÖ “Taking the Social Path! Because of you. Austria.”
 LORE HAYEK

Findings

Personalization
In around two thirds of the cases, the front runner is visually and textually present. No signi-
ficant effects of the time of publication on the presence of individual candidates could be
found. In this particular campaign, parties did not choose to display their candidate more
often the closer Election Day comes.
Party size does have a significant effect on whether the candidate is present on the poster
or not. However, other than expected, this effect is a negative one! It appears that larger
parties tend to not put their front candidate forward as much as smaller parties. Looking into
the data more closely, it is shown that this negative effect is owed to the ÖVP. Because of
their rather unattractive candidate Wilhelm Molterer, they managed to contest the first two
poster waves displaying only verbal messages respectively images of “ordinary citizens”
and only publishing a photograph of Molterer in the last week before the election.
Yet there are a few other aspects that contribute to the issue of personalization: additional
candidates are only present on three posters. “Other people” (non-candidates) are only present
on 12% of the posters, whereas the party logo is present on an overwhelming 97% of the
posters.

Image-text Relations
So how is the message conveyed?
On average, half the poster is occupied by text and parties use 11 words per poster – ranging
from a minimum of two to a maximum of 40. In 17% of the cases, text and image are related,
in 13% of cases they are partially related. In two thirds of the cases, there is no relationship
at all between the text and the image(s) used in the poster. Therefore, we can conclude that
text is being overused compared to images, as few to no political advertisers rely on images
rather than text.

Conclusion
Speaking about political advertising in Austria, one could use the term “semi-personalized”
because although the front runner is being focused upon, policy issues still played a major
role in 2008, even in short term campaign communication. Also, the candidate has not yet
replaced the party as the main identification tool, as we can see from the near one hundred
percent presence of party logos on the campaign posters.
As for image-text relations, we must pronounce a negative judgement. Political advertisers
do not really use the combination of image and text effectively; in less than one fifth of the
cases are image and text properly related to each other.
In this pilot study at hand, the interest laid on the 2008 national elections. Of course, it
would be interesting to be able to compare these elections to previous ones. A longitudinal
study will be conducted to account for time effects and draw on the development of visual
communication strategies in Austria. In the long run, comparisons with campaigns in other
countries might also be put into effect.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

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About the Author

Lore Hayek
University of Innsbruck, Austria
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