When visual communication fosters leaders’ exceptional and ordinary image: the Salvini case.

In contemporary democracies, the public image and the pictures that political leaders disseminate to the audience is of central importance to their electoral appeal. Visuals have always played a fundamental part in political communication and this importance is increasing today in light of the recent technological changes, especially the rise of social media. Despite this raised importance, studies of image projection have mainly been based on textual messages, ignoring visual content such as photos, memes and postcards . Our work intends to focus on this last aspect, namely the process of personalisation through the images that a politician disseminates on social networks.