The multimodal use of Instagram in Italian politics: how do candidates use verbal and non-verbal strategies during regional elections?

Politicians use the multimodal affordances of social media to strategically interact with voters. Previous scholarship focused on national elections, but how local candidates use verbal and non-verbal strategies on Instagram, remains comparatively unexplored. A quantitative content analysis of Instagram posts (N = 1194) was conducted to examine how candidates running in seven Italian regional elections employed verbal and non-verbal strategies. Findings showed that candidates used Instagram to convey professionalism (verbally and non-verbally) and to describe policies, but politicians leading center-left coalitions and female candidates were more likely to use Instagram to mobilize voters, attack opponents, and talk about policies. Verbal and non-verbal strategies often diverged rather than reinforced each other, and multimodal alignment was mainly limited to convey professionalism and to emphasize regional heritage and identity. Results indicate that in the Italian regional context verbal and non-verbal modalities on Instagram are frequently used as independent channels that do not necessarily convey the same meaning within a single post. Italian politicians used Instagram to post images with facial expressions conveying optimism and positivity, but no differences between female and male politicians were detected for facial expression, contradicting literature finding gender is a predictor of visual emotionalization on social media.