Electoral Campaign Still Visuals: Making Politics Entertaining

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Series: Humanities & Social Sciences. 2023. Vol. 16. No. 6. P. 921–932.

Svetlana Y. Pavlina

The article examines British and American still visuals as elements of political advertising in the context of 2000 – 2020 election campaigns. To reach voters, still visuals, that include posters, buttons, banners among others, should be original and entertaining. In this case they impact the viewers on the emotional level affecting their political choices. The purpose of this empirical research is to establish linguistic and pictorial means that make political adds unconventional and expressive, attributing some elements of entertainment to visual political communication. To this end a contrastive study of 112 American and 96 British political still visuals was carried out. The study is novel as it treats campaign still visuals from the intrasemiotic and interdiscoursive perspectives elucidating the elements of play and revealing the techniques used in two respective cultures to make political multimodal texts entertaining. The research shows that British posters contain illustrated idioms, playing on literal and metaphorical meanings, while American still visuals reveal some carnivalesque features. The bisociation theory is employed to establish degrees of creativity of the sample campaign still visuals. The findings can be relevant for the investigation of elements of play in various types of multimodal texts functioning in visual communication.

Keywords: креативность, creativity, Multimodality, полимодальность, visual political communication, campaign posters, semiotic modes, bisociation, politainment, визуальная политическая коммуникация, предвыборный плакат, семиотический код, бисоциация, политейнмент