Content Analysis in the Research Field of Political Communication: The Self-Presentation of Political Actors

Abstract

Political communication is a very wide-ranging, complex, and fluid subfield. Within this field, this chapter focuses on the self-presentational side of politics, more specifically the self-presentation of political actors. The chapter discusses the use of content analysis in research on how political actors communicate on various channels and platforms, and elaborates a selection of analytical constructs that are commonly analyzed with regard to the content, style, and the rhetoric of political actors’ self-presentation.