Visual Social Semiotics in the Moroccan Political Communication

Analysis of political campaign materials' content has been lacking and almost always focused on the available textual materials. This book, however, departs from the standard norms of looking at textual materials and instead focuses on the photographic images that appear in most political campaign materials, especially electoral programs. This book helps readers to understand the system of visual language that is inherent in electoral programs. It intends to show how visual elements have an impact on the degree of adopting a good strategic campaign. By adopting social semiotic analysis, visual elements will help to read the images’ ideologies and latent messages. In this book, the author used ‘visual grammar’ adopted by Kress and Van Leeuwen to examine fifteen images extracted from the electoral program of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) that was published by Al-Misbah: A comprehensive weekly newspaper, during the campaign for the elections of November 2011. This book is a review of the grounding theories of semiotics in the Moroccan political context. This book shows that PJD uses careful images in their election campaign to transmit Power and Ideology.