Visual Political Storytelling Across Platforms: The Campaign of Alexander Van Der Bellen and the Austrian Presidential Elections 2016

This paper explores the campaign of Austria’s presidential candidate (and incumbent president) Alexander Van der Bellen for the 2016 Austrian presidential elections. The campaign of the former university professor and Green-backed candidate can be considered Austria’s first political campaign with a systematic use of hybrid strategies. Understanding contemporary political communication as highly professionalized and strategic, this paper focuses on the evolvement of the campaign’s main storyline on three different social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. During the whole, almost a year-long campaign cycle, Alexander Van der Bellen prominently featured the story of “Heimat” (“homeland”) by turning it into an open and inclusive concept in order to challenge the exclusive campaign messages of his right-wing contestant Norbert Hofer of the Austrian Freedom Party. Established right at the beginning of the campaign, the “Heimat” (“homeland”) story was closely bound to the biographic narrative of the candidate, the refugee story of his family, and the Tyrolian Alps as visual metaphor for a new home and the conception of belonging. Our analysis seeks to explore Van der Bellen’s hybrid storytelling strategies across platforms and formats. We understand (visual) political storytelling as a new and relatively powerful tool for personalized political communication and candidate branding. Recent research on visual storytelling suggests that “[s]ocial media enables a type of long-form storytelling with few limitations on content controlled by the candidate” (Page/Duffy 2016, 3). We intend to explore how the Van der Bellen campaign manifested its program and worldviews in a visual form and how it made use of platform-specific visual content strategies in order to develop the campaign story. Methodologically, the paper draws on a combination of (visual) content analysis and transmedia story tracking in order to reconstruct the evolvement of the storyline across multiple platforms and formats. The corpus of analysis consists of several posts of Alexander Van der Bellen’s campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, referring to the “Heimat” (“homeland”)-story. Special emphasis is put on the analysis of various forms of visual content (e.g., photos, memes, GIFs, animations, videos) and their use of the affective potential of visuals in order to deliver the campaign message. Using an interpretative framework that focuses on the development of plot, character, and setting, we reconstruct the evolvement of Alexander Van der Bellen’s “Heimat”-story from the beginning in January 2016 until the end in December 2016. Theoretically, we ground our paper in research on strategic political communication and candidate branding (e.g., Scammell 2015), political storytelling research (e.g., Page/Duffy 2016), research on visual political communication (e.g., Russmann 2012, Filimonov/Russmann/Svensson 2016), and visual analysis with special emphasis on the connection between visual content production and image management (e.g., Müller 2007, 2008). The paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of hybrid campaign communication, the specific functions of political campaign channels, the platform-specific use and appropriation of visual content, and the rise of trans-media storytelling strategies in political communication.