Picture-perfect: On the relationship between party leader visibility and voting during party leader elections

Party leaders feature prominently on social media. As figureheads of their party, they are often depicted by their political party and party members. While the literature extensively covers social media strategy and campaign narratives, the actual visual appearance of party leaders in images is still under-explored. This paper seeks to fill this gap by arguing that party leader appearance is an indicator of internal political capital by providing analyses of all Instagram images posted by MPs during party leader elections from July 2019 to October 2022 in 11 countries. We use a face verification classifier that measures how often party leaders are depicted on MPs’ social media and hypothesize that party leader appearance is driven by intra-party support, especially during party leader (de)selections. Our preliminary results reveal a strong relationship between visual party leader appearance and party leader selection outcomes. We contribute to literature on party leader selection in general, and on the relationship between internal political capital and personalized politics specifically.