Seeing is (not) voting: Examining the Influence of Visual Cues on Voter Preferences with Visual Conjoint

Abstract

Does learning political candidates’ social categories through visual cues affect voter preferences? This paper explores this question by conducting a visual conjoint survey experiment with 2,324 German voters, varying whether respondents received information on candidates through explicit labels or pretested AI-generated candidate pictures. The results confirm our expectations that the way in which social categories are learned affects preferences, with visual cues having a more significant effect on voter preferences compared to textual cues, leading to more discriminatory preferences for certain social categories. Moreover, we show that the effect of visual cues is moderated by the visibility of social categories, with visible social categories, such as gender binaries and ethnic in-/out- group, eliciting more discriminatory preferences with visual cues. The study sheds light on how the presentation of visible and unvisibilized social categories affects political candidate selection and emphasizes the importance of considering the intersectionality of social categories and their relationship with ideology.