Party leaders’ representation of self(ie): the new face of political leadership on Instagram

This paper focuses on the use of Instagram as a platform for self-representation by three young Belgian party leaders: Conner Rousseau (Vooruit), Sammy Mahdi (CD&V), and Georges-Louis Bouchez (MR). It explores how these young Belgian party leaders use visual self-representations to make claims about themselves and their political persona on this new front. Through a visual analysis of their Instagram posts over the course of a year, the paper examines how the three leaders make claims about their personal and public selves, which in turn form the basis for later representative claims. This is done through a mobilization of public/private sphere and front-stage/back-stage elements to construct and perform self-representations online. The cultivation of different subject-positions by the leaders aligns with their strategic goals of fostering legitimacy, approachability, and proximity to their online audience; in relation to their party’s ideology and their personal strengths. Additionally, the theatrical metaphor of front- and back-stage is laid out and reframed as a spotlight to take into account the changed media landscape and the active role of the audience in co-constructing the performance and validating the self-representations of party leaders. The paper concludes that carefully crafted representations of the public and private self, contribute to the construction of a particular subject-position that affects the political capacity to make representative claims.