Parasocial Politics: Influencer communication and the reshaping of political leadership. : Investigating the increasingly blurry line between influencer and politician: A qualitative Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of four cases.

Sammanfattning

This study examines the growing convergence between influencer communication and political communication in the contemporary digital public sphere. As politicians increasingly adopt strategies associated with social media influencers while influencers leverage their audiences to enter formal politics setting the stage for the boundary between the two categories to become increasingly difficult to define. Despite the scale and speed of this development previous research has tended towards viewing the two as separate phenomenon in isolation to each other whereas this study treats the convergence itself as the object of analysis. Through the usage of Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) six social media videos are analysed across four cases. Fidias Panayiotou a Cyprus born Youtuber elected to the European Parliament in 2024, Brandon Herrera a gun Youtuber running for Congress in Texas, Gavin Newsom who is California's governor and is positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run, and Ulf Kristersson Sweden's current prime minister. These cases were chosen to represent both directions of the convergence from both Europe and America on all sides of the political map. This thesis has two research questions: How is the boundary between politicians and political influencers constructed and negotiated in the digital public sphere through multimodal communication strategies?How does the use of influencer strategies in political communication contribute to a reshaping of political leadership and opinion formation in a digital environment? The results across the four cases showed the same core communicative strategies of authenticity building through visual choices such as clothes to outsider positioning through language as well as parasocial relationship building elements are used. Further, due to the format of social media all cases exhibit some sort of simplification of politics as a structural consequence of the short term video format. However a key difference is identifiable as the politicians have to build up their authenticity from scratch while influencers can carry it with them into the new political space. This study concludes that the boundary is actively being dissolved and that political leadership in the digital public sphere is increasingly evaluated on the quality of the parasocial relationships a communicator can build rather than on an institutional credentials or policy expertise.