CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Celebrity endorsements are most persuasive with voters who are less engaged with environmental issues, while temporal messages explaining the tax implications of proposed referenda are more impactful with voters who believe conservation projects are important but are also concerned about how the tax increase will affect them, say the authors of a new study.
Suiwen (Sharon) Zou, a professor of recreation, sport and tourism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the research project, which examined the potential effectiveness of different messaging campaigns on Cook County, Illinois, voters’ passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Wildlife Habitat Protection Referendum in the November 2022 midterm elections. According to the Forest Preserves of Cook County’s website, the property tax referendum was expected to raise more than $40 million annually for protecting and restoring habitats, addressing deferred capital projects at Brookfield Zoo and the Chicago Botanic Garden and resolving the district’s pension shortfall.
“A green space ballot initiative is usually a good strategy to maintain stable and sustained funding for parks and recreation or natural resources agencies,” Zou said. “It’s basically a political process, so we need to understand voters’ attitudes, behavior and decision-making processes, and a huge part of that is communication.”
She co-wrote the study with Nicholas Pitas, a then-professor in the department who is now a professor of public health and health education at the State University of New York, Brockport; and Wonjin Jeong, a teaching professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri-Columbia who was a then-graduate student at Illinois. The team published their findings in the journal Conservation Science and Practice.
The forest preserves district’s voter awareness campaign prior to the election included a video endorsement by actor Nick Offerman, a Chicago native perhaps best known for his role as the parks department director on the TV sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”
Several months after the election, Zou and her co-authors investigated the potential effectiveness of Offerman’s message as well as additional messages that could have been used to target different voter groups based on their engagement with park and conservation issues. These included a temporal message explaining how much the average homeowner’s property taxes would increase monthly and annually if the proposed referendum passed, and a basic message containing only the language that would appear on the ballot.
According to the researchers, temporal reframing — a technique known as the “pennies a day” strategy — makes the tax burden seem less significant even though the overall amount remains the same.
The researchers wanted to learn how each of the messages might have affected individuals’ attitudes toward the tax referendum and voting behavior if they had been exposed to the messages prior to the election, Zou said.
In September 2023, the researchers surveyed a sample of 721 Cook County residents who were eligible to vote in the election. The study’s sample population closely aligned with the county’s electorate in demographic characteristics such as age, gender, race or ethnicity, income and education.
Accordingly, slightly more than 63% of those in Cook County had voted in favor of the referendum, according to the study. Likewise, about 64% of those in the study’s sample said they had voted for it, while 7.4% said they opposed it and 7.8% had abstained.
Study participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Those in the first group viewed a 30-second video of Offerman’s endorsement and the information on the ballot. The people in the second group read the ballot measure along with a temporal framing message that explained the average homeowner’s property taxes would increase by about $1.50 per month, or less than $20 annually, if the referendum passed. People in the control group read only the ballot message.
While both the temporal and celebrity endorsement messages effectively influenced voters’ attitudes toward the referendum, increasing their likelihood of voting in favor of it, the messages worked in distinctly different ways, the team found.
“We found that Nick Offerman’s 30-second video was very influential for voters who were not very involved in conservation issues,” Zou said. “And we were surprised, but at the same time we think perhaps there is a halo effect for celebrities who have credible images and relevance to particular causes. People may transfer these positive associations to green space initiatives, making them seem more relatable and accessible.”
Offerman’s celebrity endorsement was most persuasive with low-involvement voters, decreasing their perceptions of the tax burden while enhancing their views of its fairness, the team found. Research has shown that these voters typically view park and conservation issues as less relevant to them and tend to be motivated by superficial cues such as the likability and credibility of celebrity endorsers. Offerman’s role on the TV series, his professional persona and personal background made him a credible and relatable figure, the team said.
Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, while the temporal message did not improve low-involvement voters’ attitudes toward the referendum, it had a significant positive impact on highly involved voters’ attitudes toward it, Zou said. Reframing the potential tax increase as a more manageable, less daunting monthly cost in the temporal message may have prompted these voters to re-evaluate their financial concerns and view the referendum more favorably, the team hypothesized.
The additional property tax to be levied by the referendum was 0.025% — “and no voters can make sense of that,” Zou said. “So why not simplify that language, make it easier to digest and make it more accessible in order to help voters make an informed decision. Temporal framing is very effective and powerful in shaping attitudes and voting behavior for people who really care about conservation issues. And we suspect that is true because cost was probably the only thing that stopped some of them from voting for the measure.”
Zou said the effectiveness of the messages might differ if they were deployed during an actual election, however “Our study assumes the tailored messages successfully reach the right voters. In reality, that is a major challenge for campaign committees and volunteers advocating for a green space measure.”
