Judging a book by its cover: political impression management on Instagram: privatization and voter engagement

Abstract

Chapter 18: The professionalisation and modernization of politics have encouraged the assessment and evaluation of political candidates based on mere visual cues. Both individual politicians and political parties emphasize the importance of perception politics and consequentially of political impression management (De Landtsheer, De Vries and Vertessen, 2008). The research establishing which determinants of physical appearance and perceptions of politically relevant personality add to voter perceptions is - nevertheless - scarce (Rosenberg and McCafferty, 1987; Rosenberg, Kahn, Tran and Le, 1991; De Landtsheer, 2003; McGraw, 2003; De Vries, 2007). The research domain of political impression management is an interdisciplinary field and draws on different insights from different theoretical backgrounds. Therefore, the authors will present an overview of relevant theories and research from political communication, political psychology and political marketing. In addition, today a significant amount of impression management takes place online, via social media (Lilleker and Koc-Michalska, 2013; Bakhshi, Shamma and Gilbert 2014; Jung, Ho, Tay, Go and Hong, 2017; Karlsen and Enjolras, 2016; Larsson, 2016; O'Connell, 2018). It is generally presumed that online campaigning will gain importance over the years to come. This chapter - therefore - also includes a case-study on online political impression management. Based on previous findings establishing the politically suitable appearance in offline political campaigning, the impact of political impressions will be tested on social media. Impression management research has revealed that a formal political appearance taps into perceptions of intelligence, trustworthiness and political suitability in the eye of the beholder (De Landtsheer, 2003; De Vries, 2007). Nevertheless, social media play a new and unparalleled role within political campaigning (Lilleker, Tenscher and Stetka 2015; Filimonov, Russmann and Svensson, 2016; Bossetta, 2018) ensuing from to the assumption that politicians are closer and more personal in contacts with their voter audiences. This might lead to shifting perceptions on political suitability, advocating that a less formal and more casual political appearance adds to the perception of political suitability. The data for this research is collected via a questionnaire. Different variables are collected, amongst others: gender, age, political orientation, level of education and social media use. In the questionnaire the respondents are presented with randomly attributed pictures of different politicians in a formal and informal representation. Respondents are asked to score these politicians on the five different dimensions that make up the political impression management score: intelligence, trustworthiness, physical attractiveness, sympathy and leadership (De Landtsheer, 2003; De Vries, 2007). Respondents are also asked whether they would like the picture on Instagram (online political likeability) and to what level the candidate seems politically suitable to represent them (offline political suitability). These research results in three different dependent variables: the political impression management score, the online impression management (attributed likes) and the offline impression management (intention to vote). All statistical analysis will be carried out in R, using linear mixed models. Results will deliver further insight in the extend to what online and offline political impression management are similar or different. Furthermore, the results will demonstrate the interaction between political impression management and variables such as: political ideology gender and level of education. The chapter will conclude with confronting the offline and online findings in political impression management and the description of relevant tracks for further research in this domain.