Visual Representation in Politics: Examining the Impact of Politicians' Tailored Visual Group Appeals on Female Voters' Trust

Politicians post images on social media to build a connection with their constituents. Images have the power to elicit a range of emotions and foster identification, which is why they should be seen as visual appeals that can be tailored to specific voter groups. However, most studies that examine politicians' use of images view their visual communication strategies as attempts to construct their public persona in a particular way, ignoring the symbolic dimension of images and their potential for political representation. In this paper, I investigate whether politicians' Instagram posts make female voters feel more represented, and can thereby create symbolic representation and trust. Furthermore, I aim to find out whether this link depends on the politician's gender. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the concept of symbolic representation, and introduce several visual communication styles that might increase female voters' trust. In the second part of the paper, I introduce a research plan for a survey experiment in which I test such visual group appeals using vignettes that emulate the Instagram profiles of a male and a female fictitious politician. By varying the politician's gender, I am able to test whether symbolic representation is dependent on descriptive representation, or whether it can be generated by using tailored visual group appeals.