Description
During political campaigns of all sorts and manners, candidate’s posters have played significant roles in expressing identities and ideologies through visual communication in order to woo voters. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of visual communication techniques applied by politician in theirs political campaign posters in order to influence viewers to cast votes in their favor. The study will analyse the visual representation of the posters and the slogans used by political aspirants. This paper will analyse four campaign posters of 2017 election; two posters for persons vying for the position of the governor and two posters for persons that vied for the position of the senator. The paper intends to investigate the manner in which the leaders presented themselves in the posters. It will endeavor to identify similarities and differences in their visual presentations. The observations will help to identify the main visual strategies and linguistics techniques that were used by the politicians to persuade voters. This study will be guided by the multimodal discourse analysis because it analyses political poster which are actually multimodal in the sense that they combine different modes which include text and visual elements. The study will combine content analysis and observation methods to answer the research questions. Both content analysis and observation methods will be approached qualitatively. Research instrument will include a paper based questionnaire and a focus group discussion. The findings of this study will help to determine whether visual communication in political posters influence the political view of the viewers to vote for a specific candidate.
Key terms: Political campaign, Multimodal analysis, visual communication, visual representation, Political posters
