Instagram and Political Communication - Visual Elements in Political Campaign “Budućnost Srbije”

Abstract

For more than a decade social media have been an important medium of political communication, more accurately since 2008 and the campaign of Barack Obama. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were primarily used for political communication; however, the rapidly growing popularity of Instagram has conditioned political entities to adapt to the visual concept of communication with the citizens. One of the additional problems of this form of communication with the public is prominent political populism. Moreover, this trend is present in the Republic of Serbia, where more and more individual and collective political entities are joining Instagram. Also, the profile with the highest number of followers and posts on the Serbian political scene is the profile of the President of the Republic of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić (@buducnostsrbijeav). As far as the empirical research is concerned, the authors analyzed the posts published on this profile in the first month of its creation and the realization of the political campaign "Future of Serbia" (February 5 – March 5, 2019) and applied the methodology of Maria Grabe and Erik Bucy (2009), which includes nine visual categories characteristic of populist political campaigns. The results of the research indicated that out of 550 visual contents, 434 photographs and 22 videos can be classified into eight out of a total of nine suggested categories. According to the obtained results, the authors concluded that the communication of the President of the Republic of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić with the public through social media Instagram is based on visual content that Greib and Busy define as populist.