Aim and Research Questions

The aim of this study is to investigate how personal brands of politicians are constructed, negotiated and manifested on Facebook during an election campaign in Finland. The personal brands of politicians are the publicly marketed self-representations of politicians. While the context and focus of this study are elections and campaign communication, it needs to be remembered that the construction of politicians' personal brands is a continuous process that also takes

place outside the active campaign period. However, this study only analyzes the one-month period before the elections, during which communications are understandably more active. Additionally, brands do not result only from the acknowledged construction process, but are negotiated collectively, and there are also coincidental aspects as to what connects an individual and their brand.

However, it is the acts of communication that are specifically analyzed in this study.

The focus of this study is on the Facebook communication of the Finnish political candidates and the public during the parliamentary election campaign of 2019.

The research questions are as follows:

1. How are politicians’ brands constructed in their Facebook posts?

2. How are politicians’ brands constructed in the comments to these posts?

These research questions direct the research on politicians' brand construction to consider two perspectives: the politicians themselves, and the public participating in the communication activities on the politicians’ pages. These two main questions are further elaborated in section 4.1.

The premise of this study is that as Herkman (2011: 22–29) concludes, Finnish political communication has become mediatized, following the general trend in Western democracies. Isotalus (2017: 22–24) argues that the United States has led the process where media's significance and its repercussions have increased in relation to political actors and activities. This has increased personalization and the focus on individual politicians or their private life in politics, thereby fostering both the construction and significance of political personal brands. Personas as representations of these brands have become more prominent than topic issues, and the importance of persona is highlighted through different media (Enli, 2015a;

Isotalus & Almonkari, 2011; 2014; van Dijck, 2013; von Schoultz, 2016: 160–161), thus accentuating the need for persona literacy (Marshall, Moore & Barbour, 2020: 129).

Karvonen (2009: 98) states that the Finnish political system makes it interesting to study personalization because the voter always makes both a person and a party choice when casting their vote. Since 2007, the person's importance over the party has declined from 51% to 37% among the electorate (Isotalo et al., 2019: 16). In parliamentary elections, the prime minister's highlighted role is significant to voting (Karvonen, 2009: 103). Therefore, while attitudes to individual candidates are significant, parties also matter. Especially in the Finnish elections of 2011 and

2015, party leaders were used as leading figures for the campaign, and viewed as central for exposure, attention, and appeal of the party and other candidates (Railo

& Ruohonen, 2016: 232–233, 307).

In some cases, parties are only as strong as their leaders, and critique towards party leaders can decrease the overall popularity of the party. In 2019, this was suggested to be the case with the Social Democratic Party and their party leader.

However, in 2020, Prime Minister Sanna Marin and her performance during the corona crisis were evaluated to raise the party's popularity. Also, von Schoultz, Järvi, and Mattila (2020: 164) argue that the example of Antti Rinne (who served as Leader of the Social Democratic Party between 2014 and 2020) shows that party popularity does not necessarily correlate with the party leader's popularity.

Nevertheless, party leaders are central figures. Moreover, their personas affect voting decisions, even to the rise of new political parties (Kinnunen, 2020), and in Finland, one of the most popular presidents, Sauli Niinistö, chose to re-run for the presidency as an independent candidate, representing the people (Luukkonen, 2018).

Contrary to the suggestions of Reunanen and Kunelius (2021: 43), traditional media and social media are intertwined entities, and are not rivaling for attention.

Chadwick (2013) gives a good explanation as to why traditional media and social media should not be entirely separated, and instead should be approached as a hybrid concept, where the platforms complement and fulfill each other. However, this research is focused on social media and specifically on Facebook. Inherently, this topic lineation understands that new and significant forms of political campaigning also take place in traditional media. But by focusing intensely on a less studied platform (i.e. Facebook in the Finnish campaign context), this study necessarily excludes broadcast media and other social media platforms from the analysis.

Through social media, the public can voice their opinions, organize into groups, and influence decision-making through advocacy campaigns and mobilization.

Online political group participation has been found to correlate with offline political participation (Conroy, Freezell & Guerrero, 2012; Vissers & Stolle, 2014a).

However, Facebook has been found to politically mobilize those who are not otherwise active, even though "Facebook participation might be apolitical in nature" (Vissers & Stolle, 2014b). In this research, the participation of political actors and the public is a unique consideration point in the process of the brand construction taking place in the public sphere, and being created and organized under the Facebook pages of political candidates during their campaigns.

The political personas in this study are party leaders who have significant exposure because of their position in the party. Notably, the vote-pullers who receive many votes because of their well-established status as politicians, recognition, or other status in the Finnish political field emerge as a second group. The national context of the study comes from the national parliamentary campaign, but the concept of campaigning also applies internationally. Furthermore, Facebook is widely used by political candidates globally, and the issue of parliamentary elections concerns several countries, even if there are some differences in their political systems.

However, presenting and selling a political self is universal, as well as the idea of the electorate forming opinions and discussing them in online contexts.

While political communication online is carried out in multiple ways, in professional campaigning, a strong position is also taken by staffers who use social media in indirect ways to influence journalists (Kreiss, 2014). Here, the focus is on the communication carried out on the pages of individual politicians and the comments they receive. Kreiss and McGregor (2018a) suggest that online companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google should also be regarded as active political communication agents, because at least in some countries, they collaborate with political communication professionals. However, in their study, Facebook is only considered a platform where political communication takes place and as a tool used for campaigning, even recognizing that its affordances and functioning logic affect the communicative actions and results. But when campaign communication is planned and performed strategically, the platform becomes a tool for the user. Thus, it is not Facebook as a company that is the actor;

but rather the user who uses and benefits from its functions. However, the functioning logic defined by the algorithm of Facebook does act for the user specifically (Thorson et al., 2021), which therefore takes part of the control away from them.

Scolere, Pruchniewska, and Duffy (2018) introduce the idea of platform-specific self-branding, where the brand construction is considered through the affordances of the platform, the audience, and the producer's self concept. In this study, the affordances of Facebook, in other words, what functions and possibilities it affords the user (Treem & Leonardi, 2013) are applied with the analysis of the personas constructed in the posts and comments. However, my personal view on the audience differs from that of Scolere, Pruchniewska, and Duffy’s (2018), and whereas they view the audience as limited to what the producer expects of their audience, I propose including all public as an actor in this personal brand construction, and that they are also negotiating the persona. Thus, while there is a target demography that the politicians consider, and some of them can be followers of the politician’s page, but in reality there are more users that see a particular post

and its comments. Furthermore, Facebook also shows the posts to a broad public which has not explicitly chosen to be exposed to that specific content.

Understanding politicians' personal brands and how they are constructed online contributes to both constituents’ and candidates’ better understanding of campaign communication. Simultaneously, candidates' communication agencies and PR actors, as well as political communication professionals and teams, and different platforms' moderators will also benefit from this line of research. The presented study aligns with Green's (1993) suggestion of researchers connecting media users and producers, while also supporting media education sectors by gathering several actors from different corners of political communication. In Finland, this research has been previously discussed through personalization, focusing on individual politicians' increasing role, instead of that of parties (Alho, 2012; Isotalus & Almonkari, 2014; Isotalus, 2017; Karvonen, 2009). It has been argued that the personal figure has become more valued than the party in political communication (González Bengoechea, Fernández Muñoz & García Guardia, 2019; Isotalus & Almonkari, 2012; 2014; Rudd, 2016). Thus it is essential to research the negotiation of personas, and understand the representations of political characters. Political communication is also continuously developing, mainly as technological advancements and societal changes affect communication.

As a consequence, new research is required to understand current developments, and to strategically plan for the future.

Nyboe and Drotner (2008: 161–176) have called for reframing and remodeling the existing theories on cultural identity and production to better serve and portray the digital world. Raising the critical aspect of social media in self-presentation, van Dijck (2013) argues that it is not a neutral arena for self-performance. Instead, it is a powerful tool for promoting and shaping identities, which is easily forgotten given the ease and natural-seeming affordances Facebook has for it. This underlines the need for an update on our understanding of identity and how it is constructed online through self-representations, by looking at it from the viewpoint of persona studies and the construction of persona (Marshall & Barbour, 2015). This shift to persona and personal brands can be viewed as an appropriate new way to look at identities at a time when individuals are actively and consciously managing their personas, and thus constructing personal brands with specific aims and intentions. With the increasing mediatization and multi-disciplinary contexts of self-representations, this approach is also needed in political communication, even though ‘brands’ are generally discussed in the context of business research. However, their construction still results from communicative acts (Petrucă, 2016), which connects the concept well to marketing communications, and in the context of this research, campaign communication

and communications studies. Furthermore, Enli (2015a; 2015b) and van Dijck (2013) have also discussed self-branding as an act of “selling humans as products”

in the context of communication studies (see also Preece & Kerrigan, 2015; Kumar, Dhamija & Dhamija, 2016).

Previous international research on communication on digital platforms has focused on network analysis (i.e. Maireder & Schlögl, 2014), constructing communities (Zappavigna, 2011), the construction of the politicians' audience relationship (Parmelee & Bichard, 2013), politicians’ authenticity and the presentation of self (Enli, 2015a; 2015b), and strategic campaign communication in the hybrid media environment (Lilleker, Tenscher & Štětka, 2015). Political campaign communication research has focused on election forecasting (Burnap et al., 2015; McKelvey, DiGrazia & Rojas, 2014) and political mobilization (Carlisle &

Patton, 2013; Vissers & Stolle, 2014a, 2014b). Regarding social media use in political communication, the focus has been given to populism and disinformation (Blassnig & Wirz, 2019; Bobba, 2019; Stier et al., 2017), the adoption and application of different social media platforms (Gulati & Williams, 2013; Macafee, McLaughlin & Rodriguez, 2019; Skovsgaard & Van Dalen, 2013), comparison between parties (Larsson, 2017), and the roles of journalism and social media in political communication (Larsson, 2018, 2019; Kalsnes & Larsson, 2019).

Campaign communication has also been studied through individual cases in the context of elections, especially the election of Barack Obama in 2012 (Kreiss, 2014;

Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). Also, the Arab Spring and the Internet Research Agency case on Twitter in the election of 2016 have inspired several political communication researchers (Badawy, Ferrara & Lerman, 2018; Linvill et al., 2019;

Lukito, 2020).

In Finnish political communication research, voting behavior (Mattila et al., 2020), populism (Hatakka, Niemi & Välimäki 2017; Herkman, 2016; 2017; 2019;

Niemi, 2012; 2013; 2014a; Palonen, 2020), personalization (Karvonen 2009;

Isotalus & Almonkari, 2012; 2014), as well as mediatization and the presentation skills of politicians have been issues of interest for researchers. The politicians' use of social media in Finland has mainly been studied by quantitative analyses focusing on Twitter (Comet, 2014; Strandberg, 2013, 2016; Strandberg & Borg, 2020; Vainikka & Huhtamäki, 2015;). However, recently, there has been some qualitative research on this topic (Laaksonen et al., 2017; Nelimarkka et al., 2020).

Larsson (2015a, 2015b) and Nelimarkka et al. (2020) have undertaken Facebook research in the Nordic context by assessing engagement and content in political communication on social media. There is a call for qualitative analysis into the field of self-branding in political campaign communication. There is also a gap in

research on Finnish political candidates, the public, and their online interaction during campaigning.