How A Chart Showing Britain As 'Worst' Hurts Government Evaluations

🔎 What Was Tested

Benchmarking theories propose that voters use information about other countries’ performance—most often on the economy and gained through personal experience or the media—to judge their own governments. Observational evidence for this idea is fragile and cannot easily separate how people become more informed. A pre-registered experiment investigates whether media-style visual comparisons serve as a channel for benchmarking and change government evaluations.

📊 How the Experiment Worked

The experiment showed UK respondents a chart of cumulative COVID-19 deaths in one of two formats:

• UK-only display (the UK shown in isolation)
• Comparative display (the UK shown alongside European countries with fewer cumulative deaths)

The visual treatment mimicked widely circulated media charts to boost external validity and directly test the media-based benchmarking mechanism.

📌 Key Findings

• Seeing the UK portrayed as the “worst of the bunch” (comparative chart) produced more negative evaluations of the government, consistent with pre-registered expectations.
• Partisanship did not moderate these information effects: no detectable difference across party affiliations.
• In exploratory analyses, the visual comparisons generated larger negative evaluations among respondents with higher levels of political trust.

💡 Why It Matters

The results show that international comparisons presented visually can alter domestic opinion, and do so on issues beyond economic performance. Media-like visual benchmarks are a plausible pathway by which cross-national information reshapes citizens’ assessments of their government.