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“Why we are voting Biden-Harris”

A multimodal cohesion analysis of the Democratic party’s 2020 Presidential Campaign ads

ORCiD logo with link | IULMA — Universitat de València
Published online: 7 February 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.22072.cab
Abstract
The present study explores how text-image cohesion is achieved in a dataset of thirty-seven political ads in the playlist “Why we are voting Biden-Harris,” which is part of the 2020 Biden for President Campaign. A further objective is to analyze how multimodal cohesion contributes to persuasion in political campaign ads. Using methods from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, Michael, and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. England: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and multimodal views of cohesion (Tseng, Chiao-I. 2013. Cohesion in Film: Tracking Film Elements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Bateman, John A. 2014. Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), both quantitative and qualitative results are obtained. The quantitative results reveal that most cohesive types are of the lexical type, followed by referential, conjunction, ellipsis, and substitution. Also, the visual and verbal chains outnumber the audio chains and, thus, they are responsible for cohesion in the ads. The qualitative results show that multimodal cohesion is a powerful tool for supporting persuasion in political campaigns by appealing to emotions, a hypothetical future, rationality, voices of expertise, and altruism (Reyes, Antonio. 2011. “Strategies of Legitimization in Political Discourse: From Words to Actions.” Discourse & Society 22 (6): 781–807. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Multimodal cohesion in film discourse
  • 3.Persuasion in political ads
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • [1]Appealing to emotions
    • [2]Appealing to a hypothetical future
    • [3]Appealing to rationality and voices of expertise
    • [4]Altruism
  • 6.Conclusion
    • 1. How is text-image cohesion achieved in the Biden-Harris campaign ads?
    • 2. How does the 2020 Democratic political campaign build on multimodal cohesion as a means of persuasion?
      • [1]Appealing to emotions
      • [2]Appealing to a hypothetical future
      • [3]Appealing to rationality and voices of expertise
      • [4]Altruism
  • Notes
  • References
References (21)
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