I’m in Brno for the ECREA conference later this week, but we start with a preconference organised by the DigiWorld network on social media and elections research. The first speaker is Tuuli Tomperi, whose focus is on the affective construction of political meaning through multimodal campaign content, in Finland.
Her past work has focussed on political advertising on Meta’s platforms during the 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, and found that candidates mainly used their ads to promote themselves and emphasise party-specific political issues, but that research focussed mainly on textual content and now needs to be expanded to the multimodal aspects of such campaigning.
Finland is especially interesting for this work as it has an open-list electoral system where voters cast their votes for individual candidates; substantial social media use for campaigning; and historically strongly issue-centred campaigning – these all encourage the use of personalised as well as issue-centred campaigning by candidates on social media.
Key conceptual frames for this analysis include questions of issue ownership by specific parties and candidates; intra-party competition between candidates not just across but also within parties; the use of multimodal as well as affective communication strategies in such campaigning; and the utilisation of platform affordances in the process.
The focus of this will be a comparison between campaign strategies during the 2023 and 2027 Finnish elections.
