FINDINGS:

By examining this campaign phenomenon in France and francophone Belgium, I show that, due to their spatial visual characteristics, posters’ primary role is to signal a political actor’s electoral competitiveness to all other actors involved in the election.

Their informational function, i.e. their function of familiarizing voters with a candidate’s name, party affiliation or ideology, appears to be consistently secondary.

Moreover, by means of a large survey of party officials, analysis of campaign expenditures and visual analysis of hundreds of candidate posters, I provide persuasive evidence that major parties and their candidates are significantly more likely than minor ones to attach more importance to posters, and to use them as signals of their electoral competitiveness. Minor political actors are in return more likely to use this type of campaign to provide voters with additional campaign information.

RELEVANCE:

The findings in this dissertation speak to our general understanding of the messages that political actors try to convey in elections, of the channels and means through which these messages are conveyed, and of the interaction between political competitors at campaign time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

(As of August 7, 2009)

Chapter 1.    Re-conceptualizing Posters as Spatial Visual Communications

Chapter 2.    Mapping Posters’ Informational and Signaling Roles

Chapter 3.    What’s in a Poster and Why Does It Matter? A Political Actors’ Perspective

Chapter 4.    Why Do Postering? Signaling and Informational Roles from a Political Actors’ Perspective

Chapter 5.    Signaling and Informing through Poster Campaigns: Survey Evidence

Chapter 6.    Their Posters, Our Posters: A Game Theoretical Model of Postering Dynamics

Chapter 7.    Know Me, Love Me, Fear Me: The Anatomy of Candidate Poster Design in the 2007

French Legislative Elections

Chapter 8.    Conclusions

Files: Dissertation1 Dissertation2 Dissertation3 Dissertation4

Poster pictures database (France 2007)