Lietuvos politinių lyderių retorikos projektavimas ir sugestyvumo išraiškos

This thesis actualizes the role of rhetoric as a tool of political leadership and its characteristics in projecting a favourable image of a political leader in new media, building and maintaining relationships with the voters in a democratic society. Qualitative research conducted in the dissertation evaluates the global populism that has recently increased in political communication from the rhetorical perspective. Also the new, hybrid, social interactions and the power of a hybrid media system are analyzed within the mediatization environment, where an individual political leader acts independently. In this paper, when analyzing the projection of political leaders’ rhetoric in the overall mediatization environment, populism is articulated as a new communication phenomenon, focusing on the style of communication rather than its ideology, identifying suggestive rhetorical expressions, adjusting to the mass audience’s language on the Internet. This is a new approach, where the perception that populism merely represents unrealistic promises of politicians loses its relevance, and where the media is included into the considerations on populist communication as a second major player in a dramatizing populist communication