Who knew?

Very interesting.

“I was driving through the region and noticed the same campaign was using a different font on signs in rural areas than on the signs in town,” said Haenschen, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication. “I thought, why would this candidate be using multiple fonts?”

[...]

Haenschen and Tamul reached the following key conclusions through the study:

Individuals perceive fonts to have liberal or conservative leanings.

The more people view a font as aligned with their ideology, the more they favor it.

Fonts that fall under the serif category — ones festooned with a small line or stroke — are viewed as more conservative than fonts in the sans serif group, though differences exist within font families.

[...]

“When you’re choosing a candidate’s visual identity, you need to consider how people perceive that font.”

  Neuroscience News

I would have never imagined that fonts carry political bias. The only thing I can say after being told that people perceive them that way is that sans serif fonts are more recent, newer fonts in print.

A total of 987 survey participants read the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” presented in each typeface style, and two typefaces representing the serif and sans serif categories: Times New Roman and Gill Sans.

The respondents then rated the typeface as liberal or conservative, and answered several demographic measures related to their political ideology, party affiliation, age, gender, and race.

During the second experiment, Haenschen and Tamul used a wider range of typefaces, including multiple typefaces within the same font family.

[...]

Furthermore, partisanship moderates subjects’ perceptions of typefaces: Republicans generally view typefaces as more conservative than Independents and Democrats.

I suppose that makes sense in that Republicans tend to be more tight-laced and restrictive, seeing everything in the world as defined, black or white. It might follow that they have a lens through which they see everything, and that lens is whether it fits their view of the world or not.

Results broaden our understanding of how meaning is conveyed in political communication, laying the groundwork for future research into the functions of typography and graphic design in contemporary political campaigns.

Original Research: Open access
“What’s in a Font?: Ideological Perceptions of Typograph”.
Katherine Haenschen and Daniel J. Tamul.
Communication Studies doi:10.1080/10510974.2019.1692884.