Campaign rallies and political meaning-making

ABSTRACT Prior research determines whether politicians at rallies make programmatic, clientelist or personalist appeals. We argue that this reductive approach obscures the variety of meaning-making at rallies. We offer a vision of rallies as complex communicative events, at which multiple actors co- and counter-produce messages in numerous ways. Nonetheless, we argue that there are patterns in meaning-making at rallies. Rallies are produced in accordance with a genre which guides what components are included in them and how they are interpreted. We argue that rallies produced in that genre fashion and foreground three constructs above others: candidates, collectivities and contests. They fashion them, among other things, through representative claims. Altogether, we show that rallies are significant sites of political communication in Africa and worldwide.