Pre-Analysis Plan: Social Media Images and Police Reputation. The Effect of Visual Primes on Perceived Effectiveness and Procedural Fairness of the Police.

Traditionally, public relations work of the police has been dependent on press releases and newspaper reports. Social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram enables the police to engage in personalized communication, citizen dialogue, and to use pictures and videos as a means of visual self-representation (Denef et al. 2013, Feltes 2002, Wood 2020). Previous research suggests that police social media communication can be an effective tool to enhance citizens’ perceived police legitimacy (e.g. Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer 2015 for review). Visual representation of police officers, however, can also have negative effects on citizens’ evaluation of police reputation (e.g. Mummolo 2018, Grimmelikhuijsen & Meijer 2015). This study investigates how the visual representation of German police officers affects citizens’ evaluation on the effectiveness and procedural fairness of the police. Specifically, we argue that there are at least two broad stereotypical representations of policy officers; police officers as servants to the community (SC) and police officers as crime fighters (CF). We expect that representing police officers as crime fighter excerpts a positive effect on the police’s perceived effectiveness, while representing police officers as servants to the community increases the police’s perceived procedural fairness. We test these theoretical expectations by conducting an online survey experiment exposing participants to different visual primes taken from an official police social media account before asking the respondents to evaluate the effectiveness and procedural fairness of the police.