Faced with fundamental societal changes such as partisan dealignment and mediatisation, political parties in Germany as well as in other Western democracies professionalise their communication. Drawing on the concept of professionalisation of political communication, the present study investigates changes of campaign posters for German Bundestag elections from 1949 until 2017 with regard to personalisation, de-ideologisation and negative campaigning. By using a quantitative content analysis of visual and textual elements of campaign posters (N = 1,857) and logistic regression analyses, we found an increase in visual personalisation and in visual ideologisation. However, no upwards trend was detected regarding negative campaigning across the four phases of political campaigning. Moreover, we found no empirical evidence for an increasing textual personalisation or textual de-ideologisation. All in all, the findings of this longitudinal analysis indicate an increasing visualisation of political communication.
Election campaigns in hybrid media systems are characterised by the integration of newer and older media. With the rise of social media platforms, newer tools of political communication emerge, such as online campaign posters, complementing older tools, such as traditional campaign posters. This raises the question whether the newer medium online campaign posters replicates strategies of professionalised political communication (i.e. personalisation, de-ideologisation and negative campaigning), and whether major and minor parties differ in their use of these strategies in online campaign posters. Against this background, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of visual and textual elements of online campaign posters and traditional campaign posters ( N = 1,069) for the 2013 and 2017 German Bundestag elections. The results indicate that online campaign posters are significantly more negative than traditional campaign posters. Moreover, the use of online campaign posters tends to moderate the inter-party competition in the social media environment.
This study examines the professionalization of political communication by focusing on changes to campaign posters for Bundestag elections over the course of five eras of German post-war history. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of both visual and textual elements of campaign posters (N = 1,857) in the period from 1949 to 2017 with regard to personalization, de-ideologization, and negative campaigning. The study revealed differences related to the five eras. Following the early conservative governments (1949–1969), high levels of personalization and ideologization first became defining features of election campaigns during the social-liberal era (1969–1982). After the Kohl era (1982–1998), these trends have occurred again since the Schröder era (1998–2005) and have been reinforced in the Merkel era (2005–2017). Furthermore, we found neither a clear upward nor a downward trend for negative campaigning. Overall, our study demonstrated that political parties adapt their communication strategies to the context of the respective election.
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