Visualization Choices about Refugees Have Delimited Impacts along Partisan Lines

• In Event: The Media's Role in Marginalization

Abstract

Data visualizations are indispensable to journalists, policymakers, and scientists for communicating information. Received wisdom about these outputs' power, as well as theoretical recognition of how visuals present alternative routes for impacting political knowledge, suggests that visualizations can change what viewers think. Yet there is little large-scale evidence for this, particularly on political issues, that also considers whether specific design features are responsible. In response, I conducted a pre-registered full-factorial experiment among 3,082 British respondents who viewed a visualization about refugee inflows to the UK between 2001-2020. While the underlying UK Home Office data remained identical, the professionally-designed visualizations varied in terms of chart type, dominant color, editorial framing, and disclosure of the source. This resulted in 54 variations of the image that adhered to current good visualization practice, which enhances the treatments’ external validity. Overall, realistic choices about these key dimensions had limited effects on attitudes and preferences, and mainly on perceptions of government performance. Notably, disclosing the data source—a staple practice among visualizers and advocates of greater transparency in political communications on the grounds of improving public trust—had no effects on any of the outcomes. Moreover, where effects did exist, they were particularly pronounced among co-partisan respondents, i.e. those who already supported the incumbent Conservative party government. Overall, my study contributes cautionary evidence for delimiting the perceived effectiveness of visualization, particularly to change minds on salient issues and when outputs involve relatively uncontentious data. Theoretically, it also opens further avenues for examining how people engage with visual information, with implications for broader concerns about raising citizens’ knowledge about politically salient issues as refugees remain for many high-income receiving countries.

Author

• William Allen, University of Oxford