Improving Assessments of Group-Based Appeals in Political Campaigns by Systematically Incorporating Visual Components of Ads

Abstract

Existing research on group-based appeals primarily uses text-based methods, and while many studies show the importance of visuals in implicitly cueing groups, this data is rarely captured in a systematic way. This paper seeks to make the first important step towards filling this gap by outlining a coding scheme to evaluate how group-based appeals are used multimodally in modern political campaigns. This paper builds categories from a qualitative sample of 182 images taken from 28 television and 63 Facebook ads from candidates running in the US 2020 House of Representatives elections. Direct appeals are captured as explicit group mentions and I present new categories for indirect and baseline appeals, which incorporate primarily visual indicators of groups. Intercoder reliability tests were conducted, and the schema was applied to a larger sample of 2480 images from 125 television ads from candidates running in the three most populous states (California, Texas, Florida). This paper finds that candidates use direct and indirect appeals at similar rates, often using them in combination. Capturing visual data therefore enables greater coverage of the range of group-based appeals that political campaigns conduct. Secondly, candidates are more likely to cue occupational groups indirectly, and capturing only direct cues may lead to skewed findings in terms of which groups candidates appeal to. I find that this new coding scheme may reduce bias in measures of both the prevalence of group-based appeals and the types of groups that campaigns appeal to in modern political discourse.