Keywords

1 Introduction

Politics and their outputs are important in a person’s life and therefore very important in shaping the norms of communities and societies. Correspondingly, the electoral behaviour, and thus, the electoral choice of individuals and therefore of a nation, along with the course of actions of its political establishment and political institutions, consists of the major facilitators of the democracy, the prosperity and the general prospect of the particular state. Moreover, both the political institutions and the surrounding political environment, on the one hand, and the communicational intensions and in particular the political messages, as well as and the wider political marketing of parties or candidates, on the other hand, have their own impact upon the electoral behaviour and therefore, the electoral choice of a country. Accordingly, Greek voter seems to be emotional. This is because as a society Greeks manly acquire emotional ties with a party since their childhood, being affected by family or school. As Kyriakides stated [1] voters do not recognize this much, they do not understand it so easily. Accordingly, it is believed that additional aspects, such as self-interest, which also perform a role, are more important. The result of the emotional bond with the parties is the non-objective, often, judgment of the voters. Moreover, Greek voters seem to not judge the views expressed by different parties with the equal criteria [1]. Accordingly, the views that will come from his/her own party will be judged much more leniently with much more positive thinking than the views of the other parties.

Therefore, in the first place, it seems that mainly Greek voters, even if they dislike and disapprove of the political establishment, seem not to be sufficiently daring to make the aforementioned change happen and therefore, do not easily acknowledge their wrong electoral choices. In this logic the findings of the research aim to test and verify the profile of the Greek voter as consumer of political communication, by testing this perception and by specifying his/her behavioural map in regard to electoral habits and in particular in decoding, perceiving and consuming political messages.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Changing Electoral Justification—Electorates as Consumers

The electoral consumer emotionally approaches the choice or “purchase” of a candidate or “product” through two intersecting psychological processes, rationality of the action and function of the action [2, 3]. Consistency of the action provides the foundation of their participation and ultimately their purchase of the “product”. The voter that chooses to participate is motivated by one of three inherent behavioural patterns [4]. Accordingly, the three stages of action, thought and behavioural response before they finally purchase/select a candidate are as follows:

Identification—The acknowledgement that the candidate exists and that this is a “product to be considered”.

Acceptance—I accept that the candidate and I have a compatible platform and policy interests, I know that they are in the race, and I believe that this candidate meets my buying criteria, and I can/will consider them in my purchasing model. In this stage, you have arrived at a creditable and viable operation that can move voting consumers to purchase their candidate.

Purchase/Selection—You now have built up the sales relationship enough with the voting consumer that they are now ready to become a loyal customer and buy your product versus the competition. Moreover, according to [4], the correlation of socio-economic lifestyle and voting and consumer psychological processes will provide a stronger campaign context for messaging, outreach and voter sales closure and success.

Encoding/Decoding Political Messages. According to literature [5], within a four-stage process of communication, media texts include a variety of messages that are encoded (made/inserted) by producers and then decoded (understood) by audiences (see Fig. 1). Literature [5] proposed that: “…audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts and capability of changing messages through collective action. Thus, Encoding/Decoding is the translation for a message to be easily understood” [5].

Fig. 1
Left, A cycle starts with transformation to social practices, production, means, circulation, meaning is taken, use, reproduction, and back to the start. Right, A flow diagram starts with source to encoding, program as meaningful discourse, and decoding to receiver.

Four-stage theory of communication and Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model [5]

Full size image

Respectively, the dominant ideology is typically inscribed the “preferred reading” in a media text, but that this is not automatically adopted by readers. The three positions of decoding proposed [5], are based on the audience's conscious awareness of the intended meanings encoded into the text. In other words, these positions—agreement, negotiation, opposition—are in relation to the intended meaning. Moreover, the particular study [5] suggests here that culture and ideology are not external structures imposed upon us from above in a one-sided fashion, but sites of constant struggle and negotiation within which we are caught.

3 Methodology

3.1 Message Content Analysis

To obtain a more comprehensive and unique pattern in decoding political message, so as to respond to the research scope, it has been considered as essential to undertake message content analysis. Literature [5] defined message analysis as a method of studying and analysing communication in a systematic, objective, and quantitative manner for the purpose of measuring variables. Previous research [6] defined message analysis as a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data to their context.

Hypothesis 1: The clarity of the political messages of political parties. The clarity of the political positions (agenda) and hence the clarity and the representativeness of the communication strategies and political messages that are produced and demonstrated by the major political parties and consequently the ideological distance between the political alternatives is unclear and uncertain.

Hypothesis 2: The consumption of political message does not occur in a unique manner. Voters are decoding and therefore consuming political messages as they trust on their own social backgrounds and capability of changing messages through communal action.

Research Context. 2023 was the year of double elections in Greece at a circumstance after the deadly train disaster in Tempi and the price of the basic goods and services of the average Greek household at high. Therefore, in this unfavorable situation, the Greeks were called to the polls twice in a short period of time, a fact which certainly did not leave uninfluenced, the electoral behavior and, by extension, the impression of both the pre-election period and the elections themselves. Consequently, the above fact has influenced the research outcome [7].

Data Collection. The study develops a qualitative approach, by gathering and analysing qualitative data through the use of 10 respondents in 2 focus groups. The use of political message analysis aims to examine the messages of political parties during a particular election period.

Accordingly, the particular research involved the analysis of the central messages of the five bigger parliamentary parties ΝΔ, ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, ΠΑΣΟΚ-ΚΙΝΑΛ, ΚΚΕ ΣΠΑΡΤΙΑΤΕΣ. More specifically, the particular messages that have been considered for the particular research where the following:

  1. 1.

    ΝΔ—ΣΤΑΘΕΡΑ. ΤΟΛΜΗΡΑ. ΜΠΡΟΣΤΑ.

    (STEADILY DARING. IN FRONT)

  2. 2.

    ΣΥΡΙΖΑ—ΔΙΚΑΙΗ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑ ΕΥΗΜΕΡΙΑ ΓΙΑ ΟΛΟΥΣ

    (FAIR SOCIETY PROSPERITY FOR ALL)

  3. 3.

    ΠΑΣΟΚ-ΚΙΝΑΛ - ΑΠΟΦΑΣΗ ΑΛΛΑΓΗΣ- ΕΛΛΑΔΑ ΜΕ ΑΞΙΟΠΡΕΠΕΙΑ

    (CHANGE DECISION - GREECE WITH DIGNITY)

  4. 4.

    ΚΚΕ—ΜΟΝΟΙ ΤΟΥΣ ΚΑΙ ΟΛΟΙ ΜΑΣ. ΜΟΝΟ Ο ΛΑΟΣ ΣΩΖΕΙ ΤΟΝ ΛΑΟ!

    (THEM ALONE AND ALL OF US. ONLY THE PEOPLE SAVE THE PEOPLE!)

  5. 5.

    ΣΠΑΡΤΙΑΤΕΣ—ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΠΙΟ ΙΣΧΥΡΗ ΕΘΝΙΚΗ ΑΝΤΙΠΟΛΙΤΕΥΣΗ

    (FOR THE STRONGEST NATIONAL OPPOSITION).

The message content analysis involved both the presentation of a static picture with the basic illustration of each of the aforementioned messages, as well a video spotting/encoding each of the above messages. The selection of the specific combination has been considered as essential in order to facilitate the application of the encoding and decoding model, as it presented in the following paragraphs more efficiently. The 2 focus groups took place during July 2023, following the two electoral contests, and each one of them was consisted of 5 Greek citizens with electoral rights and a coordinator. Participants have been recruited following certain criteria by telephone approximately one week before the sessions. Moreover, the potential participants have been identified regarding the type of people they are and needs and the nature of the research and the resources available and the members of the audience through databases and resources available to the researcher. For technical reasons, the groups had taken place electronically, through the use of an e-conferencing platform “Zoom”.

Data Analysis. For practical reasons, the material used for communication generation analysis used in the research regardless of whether the sample had noticed these political communications during the time of the actual campaign. Researchers which follow similar approaches rely on the identification of structural elements, tropes, styles of argumentation, speech acts, and the like. An earlier study, [8] is an example of such an analysis. Efforts to study negotiations [8], -what works and what doesn’t-, might be described as rhetorical analysis as well. The particular analysis, based on encoding/decoding model [5] and makes reference to the communication model of Shannon and Whever [9], sends a message along a channel, to a receiver who then interprets the message, and responds through feedback that may or may not experience noise or interference. The particular method [5] expands upon this model by giving emphasis on audience. Accordingly, the process of the message analysis, involved the distinction of the following stages: information source, agenda setting -transmitter, encoder, receiver (decoder) and destination. Furthermore, with the implementation of the specific qualitative content analysis, the study aims to proceed to an analytical comparison between the political positions/agendas and promises of the major parties of each electoral case, in order to clarify the actual ideological distance between them and to spot their actual differences in terms of their actual “political agenda” versus their electoral communication branding and the actual message and the final consumer of each political message. By using the specific tool of qualitative analysis, the project aimed to investigate the distance between pre-election communication and actual campaigns, and thus, to investigate the actual distance of those positions with those of the opposite party.

4 Analysis and Discussion

4.1 Ideological Clarity and Consumption of the Political Message

The Ideological Clarity of the Political Message. An issue that came out of the conducted qualified research, is the “ideological clarity” of the political messages that have been shown to the participants [10, 11]. As it has been mentioned, the co-ordinator has shown a series of political posters and videos from the parliamentary parties as the derived after the second parliamentary elections of 2023. Accordingly, it came out from the relevant discussions that, ΝΔ, the nationalistic Party ΣΠΑΡΤΙΑΤΕΣ and the communist party KKE, considered by the research contributors to have a higher level of ideological clarity, in comparison to ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, ΠΑΣΟΚ-ΚΙΝΑΛ and the minor parties. More specifically, ΝΔ’s message, reflects the stability and the development of its liberal approach against economy, ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, reflects a negative spirit and KKE a more leftist/ communist approach. ΠΑΣΟΚ-ΚΙΝΑΛ, reflects the justice and the social equality of the third Political way, and ΣΠΑΡΤΙΑΤΕΣ, which was considered to have the higher level of ideological clarity and Ideological consistency, reflects a Nationalistic ideological image. On the other hand, ΣΥΡΙΖΑ the minor parties have been considered as ideologically unclear and inconsistent, while their messages are translated as effort to obtain a parliamentary representation.

The Consumption of Political Messages/The Attributes vs. the Promises to the Voter. The general finding of the research regarding the specific aspect concentrates on the fact that even the political message is decoded in an analogous mode by the majority of the participants; it is perceived and consumed in a diversity of manners, according to the perceptual dimension, the ideological sensitivities and the values of each participant. For example, the political message of ΣΥΡΙΖΑ—ΔΙΚΑΙΗ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑ ΕΥΗΜΕΡΙΑ ΓΙΑ ΟΛΟΥΣ (FAIR SOCIETY PROSPERITY FOR ALL), by the majority of the respondents, in particular through the relevant video, perceived a negative statement, that does not represent the reality, however a small number of the respondents perceived the message as the reflection of the reality, and therefore they consumed the particular political preposition. Accordingly, each party’s message has a positive impact only upon a certain number of voters and it is consumed only by a specific portion of the voting population. Therefore, it has arisen by the given findings that the political message during the pre-election period is consumed according to the perceptions [12] and the ideological direction of each individual [13], and by extend, the political relevance of each individual to a specific political party. The above fact has been reported by previous research [14, 15], the electoral preference of voters is affected by a range of factors, such as social group identity. Additionally, according to previous research, voters are in a way defenseless to the gravity of factors such as campaign events, issues, and candidate images [16,17,18].

5 Research Implications and Conclusions

The specific research area has vital implications regarding decoding of political message, since the ‘reception’ of the message is likely to be more questioned than it originally looked. Viewers can no longer be assumed as passively absorbing the unchanging meanings introduced there by the sender of the message, ‘decoding’ should essentially include a tussle over meaning which it is subject of the social position of the recipient [5, 8]. Even though the reported research outcomes respond to the accomplishment of formulated aims and objectives and in general lines confirm the basic hypotheses of the project, it can be argued that a number of research limitations have emerged. Moreover, the small number of sample used in focus groups, as well as the limited spectrum of the political messages tested, might considered as empirical limitations.

However, the particular research process could be seen as pilot research for further research to be directed in a favorable time, within a grater scale. Therefore, the specific results, and limitations could be exploited in optimizing the framework of more comprehensive prospect research. As it is recognized in the study and mirrored in the outcomes of the specific qualitative research as presented in the previous section of the specific paper, the voters do not judge the views expressed by different political parties with the same criteria. The electoral consumer emotionally approaches the choice or “purchase” of a candidate or “product” through two intersecting psychological processes, rationality of the action and function of the action. Therefore, they do not consume the political messages of the parties in the same way. Consequently, the view that derives from the party they support will be judged more leniently and with much more positive thinking than the views of the other parties [5, 8, 19]. The particular findings give an insight to a relatively unexplored aspect concerning the Greek political communication and thus the behaviour of Greek Voters. Consequently, political parties could use the outcome of the particular research as a feedback of the consumption of their recently used messages, and therefore as a guide for their future communicational intentions and practices. In a similar logic, the voters could benefit from the particular research outcome, in the respect that it points out the subjectivity of the way they are decoding and consuming political messages, and therefore they could optimize their future consumption of political messages.