KARSA: Jurnal Sosial dan Budaya Keislaman (Journal of Social and Islamic Culture)
Vol. 34 No. 1 (2026): in Progress

Multimodal Illocutionary Amplification in Local Indonesian Elections: A Case of Campaign Billboards in Sumbawa Regency

Samsun Amri (Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, STKIP Paracendekia NW Sumbawa, Sumbawa)
Iwan Jazadi (Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, STKIP Paracendekia NW Sumbawa, Sumbawa)
Alek (Program Studi Magister Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Jakarta)
Effrina Yuricki (Program Studi Bimbingan dan Penyuluhan Islam, Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Jakarta)



Article Info

Publish Date
29 Jun 2026

Abstract

Political campaign billboards remain a prominent yet under-theorized medium of electoral communication, particularly in emerging democracies. This study investigates how legislative campaign billboards displayed during Indonesia's 2024 general election construct persuasive force through the interaction of speech acts, visual semiotics, and ideological coding. Drawing on speech act theory, social semiotics, visual grammar, and critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes 50 purposively sampled billboards from Sumbawa Regency. Findings reveal systematic cross-modal clustering patterns: directive speech acts align predominantly with religious imagery, commissive acts cluster with nationalist symbolism, and declarative positioning frequently co-occurs with elite proximity. These patterned alignments demonstrate that illocutionary force is not linguistically self-contained but amplified through visual and ideological scaffolding. The article proposes a conceptual framework, Multimodal Illocutionary Amplification (MIA), that models persuasion as a layered process involving an illocutionary core, a semiotic scaffold, compositional structuring, ideological naturalisation, and voter subject positioning. While the framework is analytically transferable, its applicability is bound by regional socio-cultural configurations where religious and community-based patronage remain salient. Grounded in this localized context, the model advances political pragmatics and multimodal discourse studies by explaining how authority is visually performed and normalized in contemporary electoral communication.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

karsa

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Subject

Description

KARSA Jurnal Sosial dan Budaya Keislaman has reflected the Universitas Islam Negeri Maduras strong commitment to publishing the best of multidisciplinary research, arts and humanities, social studies, cultural studies, including decision studies, gender studies, theoretical or empirically grounded, ...