Leaders’ visual communication styles: between personalisation and populism

This study aims to explore how political leaders visually self-represent themselves on Instagram, the current most adopted image-centred platform. Considering the multimodality of the platform, we decided to analyse both textual (issues, tone, topics, etc.) and visual aspects (type of image, gaze, subject in pictures, etc.) derived from literature on personalisation (Metz et al., 2020; Van Aelst et al., 2012; Van Santen & Van Zoonen, 2010), populism (Bracciale & Martella, 2017; de Vreese et al., 2018; Ernst et al., 2018), and empirical studies on Instagram (Bast, 2021; Farkas & Bene, 2021). Building on the work of Ekman and Widholm (2014, 2017a, 2017b), we extend the concept of the ‘performed connectivity’ to the analysis of personalisation and populist communication by identifying actors depicted in leaders’ posts. Then, the statistical association of all these elements is interpreted as specific visual communication styles.