13:30 - 15:00
Panel Session 4
Room: Zoom
Moderator: Kamil Marcinkiewicz
Visual Messaging Modes and Their Impacts on British Attitudes Towards Economic Dimensions of Immigration
Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij 1, William Allen 2
1 Birkbeck, University of London, London
2 University of Oxford, Oxford

Despite the proliferation of visual ways of communicating political information, less work has explicitly tested for the impacts of multimodal messages. Establishing the impact of these messages is particularly salient given growing efforts (and concerns) about the roles of messengers in politics through campaigns or fact-checking on digital platforms that often prioritise visual components. We provide descriptive evidence examining whether factual information about the economic impacts of immigration on the UK matters for a variety of British immigration attitudes and policy preferences. Using a survey experiment (N=3,889 UK-based respondents), we provided identical economic information as a text-only treatment, as a series of three charts accompanied by the same text, and as an infographic video accompanied by a narrator reading the text. All three messaging modes reduced negative immigration attitudes (even when looking at Leave and Remain subgroups). We also find suggestive evidence that, at the aggregate level, charts were marginally more effective than video at changing policy preferences. We conclude by pointing out that further research exploring differences among visual modes is warranted, and—importantly for testing theories of affective polarisation—the treatments (which presented positive arguments) did not ‘backfire’ to produce more negative attitudes.


Reference:
Fr-P4-02
Session:
Political Communications
Presenter/s:
William Allen
Topic:
EU Politics
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
Zoom
Date:
Friday, 19 June
Time:
13:45 - 14:00
Session times:
13:30 - 15:00

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