The affective power of audio-visual politics: analyzing political video campaigns by multimodal approach and emotional arcs in the presidential elections in Türkiye

Abstract

With the increasing usage of digital platforms, political campaigns are more creative and complex in their content. Interactive communication, political positions, and performances send messages through visuals, sound, and text. This paper scrutinizes the affective power of audio-visual political campaigns through multimodal analysis and emotional-arc analysis of two major candidates in Türkiye’s last presidential election. Focusing on YouTube campaign videos from the two leading candidates, President Erdoğan (Justice and Development Party, AKP; People’s Alliance) and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (Republican People’s Party, CHP; Nation Alliance), we conduct a comparative analysis of contextual storylines. We find that Kılıçdaroğlu’s campaign uses less multimodality, limited fictional content, and more top-down video-based mobilization, whereas Erdoğan’s campaign uses more fictional storytelling, more varied music aligned with spoken and visual meanings, and more bottom-up online mobilization. The paper advances a more holistic approach to political video campaigns by combining multimodal discourse analysis with emotional-arc mapping to trace patterned rises and falls in emotional valence over narrative time by using a multimethod approach, including qualitative coding, interpretive approach, and large language models.