Decoding Politicians’ Instagram Profiles: How Visual and Textual Cues Shape Perceptions of Left-Right Alignment and Populist Traits. A Visual Conjoint Experiment

This study investigates how content on politicians’ Instagram profiles influences users’ perceptions of their ideological alignment and populist traits. Using an innovative visual conjoint experiment, we manipulate politicians’ sociodemographic traits (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity, occupation), lifestyle choices (e.g., food, pets), issue-based statements, and imagery reflecting dichotomies such as elite-vs-people and nostalgia-for-the-past vs. hope-for-the-future. We test hypotheses concerning how these visual and textual cues shape users’ perceptions of politicians’ ideology and populist traits, both individually and in interaction with one another. Furthermore, we examine whether the ideological perceptions engendered by sociodemographic and lifestyle cues are significant when explicit political information is present (e.g., politicians' stances on taxation and healthcare), and how respondents’ sociopolitical attributes interact with politicians’ profiles characteristics to shape their inferences. Data are collected from 6,000 respondents in Italy, France, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Results show that, while explicit political signals, like issue stances, overall shape most of the ideological and populist perceptions, other cues, especially sociodemographics, still play a relevant role beyond political cues. For example, politicians who worked as entrepreneurs and lawyers are still considered more right-wing than politicians working as teachers and waiters/waitresses, even when they express the same issue stances. A similar effect is also played by gender, with male politicians being associated with the political right significantly more than their female counterpart, even when having the same issue stances. Overall, this research provides new insights into the interplay of sociodemographic, lifestyle, and political signals in ideological inferences and contributes to the literature on partisan cues and political stereotyping. At the same time, it proposes methodological innovations by introducing a novel way of employing visual conjoint design for political communication research.