HOW DOES THE PROFESSIONALISATION OF ELECTION CAMPAIGNS INFLUENCE HOW ELECTION BILLBOARDS LOOK? - Content Analysis of a Decade of Slovak Election Billboards

Abstract

The concept of professionalisation is frequently assessed by examining the extent to which political parties utilise techniques such as polls, focus groups and then employ expertise in their communication strategies. However, more is needed to know about professionalisation's effects on campaigns' outputs. Therefore, this work uses a different approach and analyses the consequences of professionalisation for the content of the campaign materials. As there are many types of campaign materials, campaign posters are selected as an object of study. There is significantly less literature studying post-communistic democratic countries in Eastern Europe. Therefore, this thesis focuses on Slovak first-order elections, specifically elections to the National Council of the Slovak Republic. As the most important format of posters in Slovakia are billboards, this study focuses on them solely. This thesis has one research question: How does the professionalisation of election campaigns in Slovakia influence the way election billboards look, do they indicate rising professionalisation and are there any other visual features that develop over time? Five hypotheses were developed to answer these research question. In order to test hypotheses, quantitative content analysis was conducted on 483 billboards from 4 different elections that happened within the last decade (2010, 2012, 2016, 2020). As there was no database of Slovak election materials, own codebook and dataset were created. Results of the analysis show that there is rising professionalisation of campaign communication in Slovakia. Slovak election billboards became more personalised as a result of professionalisation. They display fewer symbols of ideology and they refer to ideology less. Instead of ideology, they tend to refer to policy more often. They display their logos more often and their encouragement to come and vote is less frequent. These results are even more significant among parties with bigger budgets and better-established parties. This adds to systematic evidence that connects these characteristics with professionalisation. The study also finds a systematic decrease in formal attire and neutral facial expression. Instead, politicians wear less formal clothes and tend to smile more often. These findings 4 require an investigation into whether they are connected with professionalisation or are the results of other processes. This study is important mainly because its results add to the small body of literature that deals with the question of how the professionalisation of election campaigns influences the way election materials look. It also tests previous theories in a different media system and on a slightly different type of political poster.