What’s in a Font?: Ideological Perceptions of Typography

ABSTRACT

Although extensive political communication research considers the content of candidate messages, scholars have largely ignored how those words are rendered – specifically, the typefaces in which they are set. If typefaces are found to have political attributes, that may impact how voters receive campaign messages. Our paper reports the results of two survey experiments demonstrating that individuals perceive typefaces, type families, and type styles to have ideological qualities. Furthermore, partisanship moderates subjects’ perceptions of typefaces: Republicans generally view typefaces as more conservative than Independents and Democrats. We also find evidence of affective polarization, in that individuals rate typefaces more favorably when perceived as sharing their ideological orientation. Results broaden our understanding of how meaning is conveyed in political communication, laying the groundwork for future research into the functions of typography and graphic design in contemporary political campaigns. Implications for political practitioners are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Political communication
• ideology
• partisanship
• typeface
• graphic design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F65WB.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F65WB.

Notes

1. While the term “font” may be more familiar to readers, we use the phrase “typeface” throughout this paper, as fonts are digital files containing the collection of glyphs used in design programs, whereas typefaces are the set of displayed characters.

2. Coles (2012) also distinguishes between serifs and slab serifs based on the shape of the flourish or foot of the letterform. Whereas the flourishes on traditional serifs are to some degree curved, on slab serifs the feet are angular and geometric.

3. Materials for the experiments including survey text and font swatches are available on the Open Science Framework (Haenschen & Tamul, 2019).

4. A separate analysis was conducted using linear regression to control for the effects of participant age, sex, and race on ideological ratings. Demographic covariates never approached anything more than marginal significance, and never impacted the main effects of typeface, typeface family, or typeface style on ideological rating.

5. The online supplement is available at https://osf.io/f65wb/.

6. Partisanship and ideology are not the same thing, even in this era of highly sorted partisans (Levendusky, 2009), thus before utilizing subject partisanship as a variable we affirmed that it met our expectations regarding ideological self-placement. In Study 2, subjects’ self-reported partisanship and ideology were both measured and compared; as expected, Democrats (M = 2.33, SD = 1.12), Independents (M = 3.51, SD = 1.30), and Republicans (M = 5.45, SD = 1.14), and had significantly different average ideological scores, F(2,546.86) = 543.47, p < .001; post-hoc tests were all p < .001. The same was true for Study 2, in which Democrats (M = 2.31, SD = 1.09), Independents (M = 3.61, SD = 1.31), and Republicans (M = 5.33, SD = 1.16) had significantly different mean ideological self-reports, F(2,554.4) = 536.87, p < .001. Mean ideology scores by party identification fall along the expected left-right spectrum, with Independents in the middle.

7. We conducted a similar analysis with the Comic Sans data generated by subjects, but found only partially consistent results. In Study 1, Republicans rated Comic Sans as more conservative than Democrats or Independents; in Study 2 there were no significant differences in ideological ratings of the font by party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Haenschen

Dr. Katherine Haenschen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media and political participation, and digital analytics. She has previously published in the Journal of Communication, Political Communication, and Social Science Computer Review.

Daniel J. Tamul

Dr. Daniel J. Tamul is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Virginia Tech. His research examines how news narratives and their formal features impact persuasive outcomes such as perceptions of stigmatized social groups and attitudes. His work has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Computers in Human Behavior, and International Journal of Communication.