Sports metaphors and women’s empowerment in the 2014 European election campaign in Romania
This paper examines sports metaphors as symbolic resources for electoral discourse, focusing on both their conventional nature and their strategic value in delivering the political message. It takes the form of a case study analyzing the multimodal realizations of the ‘EuroChampion’ sports metaphor in five posters used by the Romanian Liberal Party in the 2014 campaign for the European Parliament. We argue that the ‘EuroChampion’ metaphor and the richness of sports imagery are strategically used to enhance deeper doctrinal party positioning, such as promoting meritocracy and competitiveness, while, at the same time, empowering women candidates in the election.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Sports and elections: Stimulating competition and assessing candidates’ performance
- 2.1Sports imagery and politics
- 2.2Sports metaphors in times of elections
- 3.‘EuroChampions’ at work: Corpus and methodology
- 4.Findings: Identification and analysis of the metaphors in the posters
- Campaign poster 1
- Campaign poster 2
- Campaign poster 3
- Campaign poster 4
- Campaign poster 5
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
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