Parties against stickers?: On the reluctance of political parties to use stickers

The immense popularity of the sticker is due to its flexibility, both in relation to its mediacy and its rhetorical possibilities. But while stickers are used by a variety of senders, they are shunned by the mainstream political parties in Scandinavia (at least). This is puzzling, as political parties generally have been eager to pick up all means of communication to reach different segments of voters. In this article, I make a theoretical analysis of what exactly is the sticker’s mediacy (its way of being a medium) and what its rhetorical affordances are – meaning its potentials for fulfilling various functions in communication – and discuss these in relation to the role of the (mainstream) political party. Stickers can be used for all sorts of messages; they can include pictures, graphics and text; they are tactile and can use three-dimensional features and they can be used for any rhetorical purpose. Furthermore, they can be placed practically anywhere in private or public spaces (legally or, most often, illegally). They can be disseminated without any indication of the sender, and their distribution is left to individuals who may or may not belong to an organization. The question I address here is how this can affect the usability of the sticker for political parties in a Scandinavian context. I discuss these possibilities and constraints from the theoretical point of view of multimodal semiotics and rhetoric but also from a more pragmatic position of strategic political communication, assessing the potential use of stickers across the political field. The suggestion is to consider a new aspect – rhetorical liabilities – to describe the adverse effects of using a particular medium for political communication.