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Motivated by the conjecture that traditional political communication patterns and strategies are broken within social network sites, this paper investigates the presence of Portuguese political parties on Facebook during a year with two major elections (European and Legislative), both from the posting activity aspect and the user engagement. The following research questions are formulated: Is it possible to identify distinctive styles adopted by different parties or to demonstrate that their audience acknowledges them in a different manner? If such distinction is possible, can it be correlated with the party's foundation time, relative size, or positioning within the political spectrum? Our analysis shows that the common assumptions that older parties do not behave like newer ones fail when tested against the collected data. We also observe higher levels of user engagement attracted by newly founded, minor, and right-leaning parties, compared to their older, major, and left-leaning counterparts, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instagram has become an important tool to contact the audiences both in commercial and political communication. Of special interest is the use of this social network by politicians, who can use the image to portray a humanized version of themselves: it is not the candidate but the person who is talking to citizens through impacting images posted on their personal profiles. The present study posits that Instagram is a key tool for self-representation. This paper offers a specific study about the use of Instagram by the five main candidates in the Spanish general elections in 2019. The main aim of this paper is to study if the Spanish candidates showed themselves on Instagram in a more humanized way during the electoral campaign. Departing from Goffman's theory about the presentation of the self, a content analysis has been carried out as methodology, where Goffman's concepts have been operationalized. The analysis was applied to a total of 473 Instagram posts, covering both a pre-election period and an election period. Results show that Spanish candidates tend to show themselves as professional politicians, but some candidates of new parties increment their humanization in the elections period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideology and political ideologies in general have been addressed both from theoretical and applied perspectives by media and communication scholars in an attempt to reveal whether pluralism is present or absent in the media. However, the complexity of such a task has proven to be high as well as very problematic. The efforts to systematise the study of ideology in the media in order to make it objective and systematic have been scarce. This paper tries to contribute to such systematising by providing a method to analyse political ideologies in the media that aims to be objective and replicable in the political context of Western democracies. Our work was inspired by previous studies that were mostly conducted in the field of political sciences and political communication. The main goal of this paper is to reach a deeper comprehension of ideology, in general, and political ideology in particular, and to conceptualise a method that aims to be instrumental in the analysis of the media from the viewpoint of political ideologies but without being restricted by traditional labels that may reproduce cultural biases. The theoretical-analytical method here suggested addresses ideologies in newspapers to identify worldviews according to four general values: individualism, communitarianism, egalitarianism and elitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the use of Telegram as an electoral communication tool in Spain, focusing on the messages sent by the five major parties in the country (PSOE, PP, Vox, Unidas Podemos and Ciudadanos) during the campaigns corresponding to the general elections of April 28 and November 10, 2019. This research paper steps outside this somewhat still narrow area of methodology by combining two different research techniques on a methodological triangulation: traditional content analysis and data mining processes using Python. Results, which show how political parties in Spain use Telegram mainly as a mobilization tool while expressing closeness with the candidate, are contextualized thanks to the implementation of Big Data analysis techniques that improve and allow for an in-depth investigation and understanding of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of public issues that become prominent as a result of their dissemination in the media poses a problem that should be addressed from a multidisciplinary scientific perspective. This paper examines some of the key concepts that played a significant role in Le Pen's and Macron's political campaigns during the 2017 French presidential election, and focuses on the detection of fallacies and turns of argument. The methodological approach of the study applies an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of some of the most common arguments and/or fallacies used in Macron's and Le Pen's media strategies during the election. In order to do so, three pieces of news about each candidate have been selected to be published with regard to Spanish native media, such us eldiario.es and elconfidencial.com, as well as national newspapers such as La Razón. The results allow us to identify some of the discursive guidelines that are common to political communication strategies in France, and to uncover the use of some of the most frequent fallacies shared by both candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of pre-electoral coverage of Carta Capital and Veja, Brazilian magazines, from search about "Elections 2014" on their online portals. The analysis period is from January 2013 to February 2014, so before the official candidacy definitions. It is considered that the press information have an important role in the public debate and, although Carta Capital and Veja still keep their printed version, they also produce content for the internet in order not to miss relevance. The objective of this paper was to compare the production of contents, the volume of quotes on the main candidates and the interactivity from publications of these two magazines on the Internet. From this, we believe it is possible to make inferences and considerations about the participation of readers and trends in the coverage of each vehicle in the electoral period. The method is a comparative analysis and the results show some differences and similarities between those portals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the use of television by the Brazilian parliament, based on the examination of the programming policy of TV Câmara, the channel maintained by the Chamber of Deputies (2010-2016). The research identifies four strategies the channel uses to broaden the possibilities of political dissemination: live transmission of the legislative sessions; news shows; debates and interviews; cultural and documentary programs. This article examines the evaluation of the content from the perspective of mediamakers, members of Congress and the public. Mediamakers defend the TV schedule as an instrument of transparency of legislative activities, promotion of public debate and national culture. Members demand more attention to their activities, including in their electoral bases, while the public highlights the function of monitoring legislative activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the visual aspects of the official profiles on Twitter of the main candidates for the Spanish general election of 2015. For this purpose, a qualitative methodology is used through a category system applied to the study sample, which is composed of 527 images. This research concludes that the management of the images made by the profiles of the main political candidates, who attend the general elections, focuses especially on the figure of the politician, leaving aside fundamental aspects such as the presentation of proposals and new initiatives for citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News acquire a new dimension due to social networks like Twitter. In this platform, citizens discuss and gain influence in issues traditionally reserved to media. Journalists are no longer limited only to inform. Politicians have a new line to talk directly with voters. Social movements take benefit of the viral nature of Twitter to denounce the abuses of power. To evaluate the reach of these changes in journalism and political communication, the strategies used by each kind of actor on Twitter are examined in this paper through the methodologies of the content analysis and framing studies applied in the cases of #ArdeValencia (forest fires in Valencia) and #25N (elections in Catalonia). Both hashtags refer to events happened in Spain in 2012. Findings show that traditional actors in the public sphere, such as journalists and politicians, tend to promote themselves without interacting with others, while collectives of citizens seem interested in supervising political parties and politicians at least during electoral campaigns. Furthermore, a partisan use of tag #ArdeValencia is detected in order to discredit the Valencian Government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research about the concept of influence on Twitter is still underdeveloped. This work is a theoretical and empirical approach on how politicians are engaging with citizens and/or journalists, and how these social conversations are framed under specific topics and users. The idea of new influentials on political communication in the new media ecosystem, as some studies found (Dang-Xuan et al, 2013), can offer empirical pursuit of the suggested 'two-step flow model' as applied to the agenda-setting process (Weimann et al., 2007) in the case of the microblogging for campaigning online. Following the recent research about how politicians try to reach their potential audience (Vaccari and Valeriani, 2013; 2013a), this paper analyses the social conversations on Twitter driven by politicians, the main topics in these political conversations and the kind of flows of communication (direct or indirect) between politicians, journalists and citizens. This research explores the differences and similarities about influence on Twitter during European elections in two countries with similar political and economic contexts: Portugal and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framing theory holds nowadays one of the most prominent places in communication research (Weaver, 2007), and especially specially in political communication (Sádaba, Rodríguez-Virgili & La Porte, 2008). Despite framing has obtained a great relevance, it has not achieved yet a conceptual and methodological clarification (Vliegenthart & Van Zoonen, 2011). Framing theory lacks a definition shared by most researchers and many of them refer to different concepts by framing. As Robert Entman stated, it is a fractured paradigm (Entman, 1993). This paper proposes a systematization of the lines of research in which framing can contribute to the study of political communication: constructivist, cultural, narrative, methodological, of journalistic roles, strategic and symbolic. Through this proposal, we expect to define the fields in which framing can help to the research and practice of political communication, as well as recovering some aspects that have not yet been sufficiently explored, in order to advance into an integral understanding of the term [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]