This article explores Swedish parties’ activities on Instagram during the 2014 elections. Understanding party campaign communication as highly strategic, that is, communication to persuade and mobilize voters in order to win the elections, we ask whether Instagram was used to (1) broadcast campaign messages, (2) mobilize supporters, (3) manage the party’s image, and (4) amplify and complement other campaign material (i.e., hybrid campaign use). With this study, we follow previous studies on the use of digital communication platforms in the hands of campaigning political actors, but we direct our attention to a new platform. We conducted a content analysis of 220 party postings on Instagram, collected during the hot phase of the campaign. The result shows that the platform was mainly used for broadcasting rather than for mobilization. The image the parties were presenting leaned toward personalization with a strong presence of top candidates in their postings. Top candidates were primarily displayed in a political/professional context. Finally, half of the analyzed postings showed signs of hybridized campaign practices. The presented findings give a first glimpse on how political parties use and perform on Instagram.

Relating to theories of dissonant public spheres and affective publics, we study negativity, dramatization, and populist content in political party Facebook posts across 12 countries during the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament Election campaigns. A quantitative content analysis of 14,293 posts from 111 (2014) and 116 (2019) political parties shows that negative emotion, negative campaigning, dramatization, and populist content has increased over this time. We show that political parties sought to evoke more negative emotions and generate more dramatization, engaged more in negative campaigning, and included more populist content in their Facebook posts in the 2019 EP election than in 2014. Further, we show that posts evoking negative emotions and dramatization and involving negative campaigning yield higher user engagement than other posts, while populist content also led to more user reactions in 2014, but not in 2019. Negative, exaggerated, and sensationalized messaging therefore makes sense from a strategic perspective, because the increased frequencies of likes, shares, and comments make parties’ messages travel farther and deeper in social networks, thereby reaching a wider audience. It seems that the rise in affective and dissonant communication has not emerged unintentionally, but is also a result of strategic campaigning.

Along with the recent boom in support of populist movements in Europe, social media seems to be the ideal place for their interaction with the public. While Facebook has been thoroughly explored for populist campaigning, there is still scarce research on visual aspects of their communication. Analysing the 2019 European Parliament campaign, this study seeks to determine the distinct characteristics of a populist visual communication style and its differences in relation to the non-populist parties. Applying quantitative content analysis to the images ( N = 997) posted on Facebook by political parties from 28 countries enabled us to show that there is a predominance of similarities in both communication styles. Although populists demonstrated a higher propensity to depict their leader and use national symbols, these were exceptions to the overwhelming evidence of uniformity in campaigning methods. Hence, we argue that despite evidence of textual visibility, populist communication does not explicitly manifest through images.

With the rise of social media platforms based on the sharing of pictures and videos, the question of how such platforms should be studied arises. Previous research on social media (content) has mainly focused on text (written words) and the rather text-based social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Drawing on research in the fields of visual, political, and business communication, we introduce a methodological framework to study the fast-growing image-sharing service Instagram. This methodological framework was developed to study political parties’ Instagram accounts and tested by means of a study of Swedish political parties during the 2014 election campaign. In this article, we adapt the framework to also study other types of organizations active on Instagram by focusing on the following main questions: Do organizations only use Instagram to share one-way information, focusing on disseminating information and self-presentation? Or is Instagram used for two-way communication to establish and cultivate organization-public relationships? We introduce and discuss the coding of variables with respect to four clusters: the perception of the posting, image management, integration, and interactivity.