Visual Politics in the Digital Age: A Comparative Analysis of Democratic and Autocratic Leaders on Social Media

Political leaders use social media to bypass traditional news gatekeepers and communicate directly with citizens. Visual material is particularly effective for this purpose. However, the images leaders choose should differ by the political context they operate in. Autocratic leaders should focus less on social and inclusive imagery and more on self-presentation compared to their democratic peers. We explore this using a new data collection of more than one million images posted by a global sample of political leaders on social media from 2012 to 2022. Using computer vision techniques, we extract information on the social context of these images, in order to analyze differences between autocracies and democracies. Our results show that democratic leaders present themselves in a more social light than their autocratic peers. There is also important variation within democracies, with more personalist democrats emulating the communication strategy of authoritarian leaders.