Mapping Visual Politics in the Digital Age: A Descriptive Exploration 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. Autocrats 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 map differences between autocracies and democracies, and between personalist and non-personalist leaders. Our results show that democrats present themselves in a more social light than their autocratic peers. There is also important variation within democracies and autocracies, with personalism reinforcing aspects of authoritarian communication strategies in both regime types.