What You See Is What You Get: Drawing Inferences From Campaign Imagery

Can images in campaign ads change voter perceptions of candidates? I use a series of controlled experiments to demonstrate that viewers make inferences about a candidate based on the types of people depicted in campaign ads. Viewers were more likely to believe that the candidate supported political benefits for certain demographic or professional groups when images of group members were included in campaign ads. They were also more likely to characterize the candidate as liberal or conservative, depending on the ideological reputation of the group pictured. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): Storyboards for campaign ad stimuli]