Despoina A. Christoforidou

Description

This doctoral research is situated in the field of visual political communication with a focus on visual framing in social media election campaigns. It examines the visual self-presentation of Greek party leaders across five national elections (2015–2023) through a quantitative content analysis of 4,900 static photographic images posted on their official Facebook and Instagram profiles. The study adopts a combined denotative and stylistic–semiotic approach. At the denotative level, static photographic images are deductively coded using Grabe and Bucy’s (2009) visual character frames, while at the stylistic–semiotic level they are coded for camera distance and camera angle, known as structural features.  Moving beyond descriptive comparisons, the study advances visual framing research by testing associations between visual character frames and structural features.