Click to Count: The Effects of Nonpartisan Cue Endorsements in Selecting Political Information

Abstract

Abstract The endorser effects literature expects the public to be swayed by cues offered by trusted or liked sources. A useful question for political marketing scholars is whether inherently nonpartisan cues impact public willingness to access nonpartisan political information. We use two social media-based field experiments and two survey-embedded experiments to test whether a randomly assigned visual marketing endorsement of political information by a known nonpartisan organization in paid ads (i.e., the League of Women Voters) encourages users to click on an information video about upcoming elections. We found an overwhelming subject response to the information video when the League of Women Voters (i.e., the endorser) cue is present, relative to the control group that received no cue in either the field or survey experiments (and controlling for partisanship and political interest in the survey experiments).