Waves and tides in Times of Elections

Abstract

Metaphors are pervasive in mediated political discourse for their capacity to frame public perception and influence political attitudes (Charteris Black 2011, 2021; Musolff 2004, 2016). Among them, water metaphors are especially frequent in contexts of electoral processes. This article analyses two of these metaphors, waves and tides, in four countries undergoing elections in 2022 and 2023. To this aim, a multilingual sample of 200 news items was collected from digital media of all ideological stances and analysed for their frequencies, collocations, mappings, elaborations and evaluative meanings. Results show that our embodied knowledge of waves and tides as huge, relentless, cyclic forces is projected onto the political context of elections by means of mappings like ‘mass’, ‘change’ and ‘movement’, and also ‘catastrophe’ and ‘resistance’. The four languages show many similarities in their usage, but also significant differences derived from specific local contexts.