Multinational and Multimodal Character Framing of Political Candidates in Online News

Do Political and Media System Classifications Matter

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7474601
AutoresDennis Steffan (0000-0002-1754-3226, Freie Universität Berlin, autor correspondente), Maria Elizabeth Grabe (0000-0001-6372-8363, Boston University), Umberto Famulari (0000-0001-6700-7328, Colorado State University)
Ano2026
Volume31
Fascículo1
Páginas5-27
Data de publicação2026-01-01
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe International Journal of Press/Politics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1940-1612 • E-ISSN: 1040-1620
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/19401612241285665
OpenAlexW4402992821
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas39

An evolving body of research generally referred to as visual politics has brought the heavy research focus on linguistic modalities of political communication closer to parity with visual emphasis. The study reported here transcends this schism by joining momentum toward multimodality as an ontological departure point for research. We expanded an existing visual instrument into a multimodal one and provided evidence that it reliably captures character framing of political candidates (stateliness, compassion, mass appeal, ordinariness, and sure loser) in German, Polish, and United States commercial online news. We focused on election coverage in these countries because they represent three distinct political and media systems (democratic-corporatist, polarized-pluralist, and hybrid) of the Global North. The quantitative content analysis sample we used spans 2,688 online news stories with seven political candidates identified in 6,560 cases across six modalities (still images, moving images, frozen video images, text, audio, and superimposed text). We found support for the hypothesis that political and media system latencies affect how news media frame the character traits of political candidates in both visual and linguistic modalities. Specifically, the competitive tendencies of majoritarian democracies manifested more clearly as candidate-centered, simplistic, and polarizing character framing in US media content than in journalistic output of multiparty consensus democracies. For example, US news media were more consistent in their portrayal of election winners and losers than German and Polish news media, emphasizing stateliness, compassion, and ordinariness in the winner while unambiguously assigning the negative sure loser frame to the election loser

Advertising · Business · Framing (construction · Media studies · Multinational corporation · News media · Political communication · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · History · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Social Media and Politics

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