New functions of Instagram in the progress of political spectacle: the key professional elements and visual strategy of Vox in its electoral debut
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2021.mar.20Keywords:
Political communication, Elections, Leadership, Social media, Instagram, Video, Spectacularization, Personalization, Mobilization, Political attack, Populism, Polarization, Far right, VoxAbstract
In recent years, Instagram has become established as a powerful tool for electoral communication and building political leadership. Our objective herein is to analyze the audiovisual management of the leading party on this social media platform, Vox, in the key period of its political consolidation in Spain. The methodological design is based on content analysis. Using our own model, inspired by the structure of the five classic journalistic questions (5W), nine thematic and formal categories associated with spectacularization have been reviewed during two key periods of the electoral year 2019. The final sample includes 189 videos published via five official accounts belonging to the party with a significant volume of followers (between 735k and 21.9k). The results of this analysis provide three main contributions: the identification of an innovative use of Instagram that includes new functions such as mobilization and political attack; the identification of a reference model for audiovisual management of social media at three strategic levels (operational, thematic, and expressive); and the integration of the results into the current debate on the spectacularization of politics, the advance of populist discourse, and its democratic consequences.
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