Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/337875 
Year of Publication: 
2026
Citation: 
[Journal:] European Journal of Political Research [ISSN:] 1475-6765 [Issue:] FirstView [Publisher:] Cambridge University Press [Place:] Cambridge [Year:] 2026 [Pages:] 1-26
Publisher: 
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Abstract: 
Social media often follow a visual logic found to increase engagement, as images are more likely to attract attention, presenting information on a holistic-associative basis. For a political entity like the EU, social media are a promising route to overcome the remoteness to its citizens, identified as one of the crucial challenges to its public legitimacy. Against this broader background, our study analyses the influence of 10 years of EU visual social media communication on user engagement as an indicator of successfully creating visibility in a crucial communication space. For this purpose, we conducted an image-type analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative features of visual analysis: First, a subsample of posts was inductively analysed to identify recurring image types and subsequently used to implement a manual quantitative visual content analysis. Building on the results, we drew on a machine learning approach, allowing us to analyse over 40,000 posts, including more than 20,000 pictures. Our results emphasise the crucial influence of social media affordances in explaining user engagement with EU visual social media communication. Implications are discussed with reference to the ongoing discussion about the EU’s democratic deficit.
Subjects: 
European Union
social media
image analysis
automated content analysis
user engagement
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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