PICTURES AT AN ELECTION A visual semiotic analysis of Swedish political parties’ visual communication in the 2018 election

Abstract

The following thesis utilizes visual social semiotic analysis in order to investigate the usage of images by Swedish political parties during the election campaign to the Swedish Riksdag of 2018. Visual semiotics is used to identify the themes and the visual methodology used in images in election posters before comparing these to posts made by the parties on Facebook the week preceding the election in 2018 in order to ascertain whether there were differences in said themes and methodology in the posters compared to the Facebook posts or not. All eight parties investigated were found to have differences in their usage of these themes to a varying extent, with the differences of the Sweden Democrats standing out when compared to the differences of the other seven parties investigated.