The personal can be political : the political returns to a good personal image

Abstract

Personal image seems to be a growing concern among politicians. Many elected officials can be seen making efforts to keep a charismatic personal image in their social media while in power, trying to convey positive personality traits or giving glimpses of their intimate lives in their posts. In this work, we explore the link between a politician’s personal public image and voters’ evaluations of their performance as policymakers as a possible explanation for such efforts. To this end, we run an online experiment randomizing exposure to selected excerpts from the social media activity of a prominent US elected official. We find that treated respondents, especially young ones or those who spend more time on social media, give higher evaluations to the performance of said politicians, although the effect sizes are small and not strong. When correcting the p-values for multiple hypothesis testing, necessary since we have several outcomes, none of the effects are statistically significant at conventional levels. Our evidence is also consistent with biased interpretation of information as a possible mechanism.

Keywords: Economics, Behavioral Economics, Politics, Public image campaign, Public Opinion, Social Media.