Place-Based Imagery and Voter Evaluations: Experimental Evidence on the Politics of Place

• Date: 01 June 2019
• Author: Nicholas F. Jacobs,B. Kal Munis
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912918781035
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918781035

Political Research Quarterly

2019, Vol. 72(2) 263 –277

© 2018 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912918781035

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Article

Politicians and pundits describe America in many ways:

there is a red America and a blue America; whites live in

one place, none-whites in another; the United States has

two liberal coastlines and an expansive conservative

heartland in the middle. Yet, while geography is implicit

in all these characterizations of contemporary politics, it

is almost always relied upon to illustrate one of the more

commonly discussed determinants of American political

behavior—partisanship, race, ideology. While these three

markers of political and social identity have long been

used to understand the sources and structure of public

opinion (Converse 2006; Fiske and Taylor 1984; Kinder

and Sanders 1996), physical places can serve a similar

function in shaping political attitudes. As the seminal

geographer John Agnew (1987) argues, an individual’s

perception, appreciation, and realization of a physical

space and the features of that space filter the impressions

of political action that take place within it. Place is more

than just a picture in one’s head—it is a personal and

emotional attachment to the spaces where people work,

play, and live, which in turn structures how we interpret

political phenomenon that affect those.

In this paper, we present results of a survey experiment

designed to measure the independent effects of geography

on voters’ evaluations of candidates running for the U.S.

Senate. Our evidence confirms a growing consensus devel-

oping in the literature that “rural consciousness” is a pre-

dominant way in which many Americans recognize and

make sense of politics (Cramer 2012, 2016). We also find

evidence to suggest that urban residents also rely on a type

of place-based identity, but that it is less tied up with feel-

ings of resentment or marginalized status. In our experi-

ment, we randomly showed respondents one of three

images for a fictional candidate running for the U.S. Senate

and asked them to evaluate how “warmly” they felt about

him. Two of the images were “micro-tailored” to the

respondents’ state of residence, with one of them showing

the candidate in front of the state’s largest city skyline, and

781035PRQXXX10.1177/1065912918781035Political Research QuarterlyJacobs and Munis

research-article2018

1University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

Corresponding Author:

B. Kal Munis, Department of Politics, University of Virginia, P.O. Box

400787, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.

Email: bkm6ac@virginia.edu

Place-Based Imagery and Voter

Evaluations: Experimental Evidence

on the Politics of Place

Nicholas F. Jacobs1 and B. Kal Munis1

Abstract

Prior research has shown that social identities defined by an attachment to place (i.e., “place-based” identities) are

influential in shaping how citizens understand and think about political topics. Moreover, prior research has also

argued that candidates sometimes use “place-based appeals” in order to win support among the electorate, and that

such appeals are seemingly widespread. While past research has provided a rich understanding of what place-based

identity and place-based appeals are, there is a large gap in what we know about the causal effects of such appeals. In

this study, we address this gap by testing experimentally the effects of place-based appeals on voters’ evaluation of

candidate likeability and ability to understand their constituents, across the broader American patchwork. Using a set

of modif‌ied campaign mailer advertisements, we alter whether respondents see an ad that uses rural or urban imagery

when introducing a candidate. Our results indicate that, consistent with existing theory, place-based appeals are

impactful in shaping political evaluations among rural voters, but do not appear as relevant for urban voters. Overall,

we argue that place—or symbolically charged geographical sites—is a useful, widespread, and potentially powerful

political heuristic.

Keywords

place, politics and geography, political advertising, social identity, persuasion