The Rhetoric of Greek Political Advertisements

The trend of present-day politics is towards its “aestheticization”. Advertising is the most visible “tool” of popular political communication and television is its key “prophet”. Hence, modern political communication employs the potentialities of TV in order to achieve its objectives in a highly effective manner. Nowadays, the TV political advertisement has an undisputable role both in the electoral outcome and as a mediator between the political parties and the voters. The aim of this paper is to contribute further on the discussion regarding the function, the content and the morphology of the TV political advertisement. Based on the tri-component model of Kaid and Davidson (1986) “Videostyle”, the authors have conducted a survey on TV political advertisements of the Greek General Elections of 2007 and 2009. By using content analysis based on a coding frame, adapted to the above mentioned typology, we attempted to examine TV political ads as for their morphology and content as well as to trace current trends and changes that have occured in the field of political communication.