Visualizing inequality: How graphical emphasis shapes public opinion

Abstract

Graphical representations of political issues and economic trends are an increasingly popular means of conveying information to the public. However, graphs have the potential to shape public opinion by visually emphasizing or downplaying the information they convey. I randomly assign subjects to view graphs that represent the same underlying information but that differ in relative emphasis: one is consistent with a textual account of rising inequality, while the other de-emphasizes the same information by increasing the scale of the Y-axis. My results indicate that graphical frames provide powerful contextual cues: for Republicans and conservatives, exposure to the de-emphasizing graph results in a 40% decrease in expressed support for intervention against inequality relative to Republicans and conservatives in the control condition, despite the fact that both groups read the same textual information. My findings reveal how an increasingly important and unexamined form of political communication affects public opinion, also suggesting promising avenues for future research.