Seeing the Visual: A Literature Review on Why and How Policy Scholars Would Do Well to Study Influential Visualizations

Visualizations are important for policy debates. In a single image, vi-
suals convey information, values, and emotions. Think of the shocking
image of Alan Kurdi’s drowning and the abrupt shift in immigration
policy debates in Europe. Visualizations influence policy and politics,
but how? This article presents a detailed and analytic overview of
the state-of-the-art research on visualizations from the policy and
political sciences and suggests a research agenda. We identified five
explanatory roles for how visualizations influence policy and policy
debates as: 1) sense-making devices for interpreting complex infor-
mation; 2) emotional triggers to strategically manipulate the viewers’
sentiments for political gains; 3) objects of political meaning making;
4) icons that convey social and cultural norms; and 5) portrayals of
the underlying values that matter when representing situations in so-
ciety. We applied our findings to a visualization of the controversial
gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas applied to food. We claim that
these five roles need to be combined to better understand how visual-
izations are influential over time and for different policy actors. We
argue for studying visualizations as boundary objects whose meaning
is negotiated between (groups of) policy actors and that can change
over time.