Television in political campaigns

The session “Political campaigning on television”, one of the conferences included in the Political Comunication Research section, started around 14:30 with Barbara Wolf Ludwig Maximilian, Thomas Koch and Andreas Fahr, from the University of Munich, Germany. They developed “The influence of verbal and visual information on candidate evaluation in presidential debates”, a study in which they analyzed the influence of personal characteristics or any other non-verbal information of the candidates in the people’s opinion.

Marko Bachl e Arne Spieker, of Hohenheirn University, Germany, created a work called ‘Opening the Black Box: Exploring Immediate Audience Responses to Rhetorical Strategies in televised debates’. They spoke about the importance of the debates in the German television in the people’s political decision; the influence of the televised debates in the change of the opinion about some candidate.

Christina Holtz-Bacha, Jacob Leidenberger, Philippe J. Maarek, from the university of Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne, in France, and Susanne Merkle, from the Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, presented a study named “Campaigning for Europe. Political advertising in France, Germany and the UK during the European election campaign”. They compared the different mediatic formats, the most important topics approached during the campaigns in each country.

Susanne Merkle, presented another study: “«Sego», «Sarko» and the others: political TV advertising in France during the 2007 presidential election campaign”. She compared the numbers of spots each candidate used in his campaign as well as the different formats and the influence of the personal values of the political contestant.

The session ended with the presentation of Jose-Carlos Lozano, of the Technologico de Monterrey, in Mexico, with his study “Clowns as critical inquirers in Mexican national television: political humor and satire in the weekly nightly show «El Notifiero»”. He afirmed that “tv has given a new life to the elections”, and alerted for the important role of the new media in the political publicity.

Inês Espojeira and Andreia Mandim