How Communication Style Shapes Political Trust More Than Populist Content in Domestic and International Politics

This commentary advances a critical intervention in debates on political persuasion by foregrounding original pilot research on communication and trust. Based on an online experiment with 322 UK participants, the study isolates the effects of communication style from semantic content by comparing responses to a still image, an untranslated video, and a subtitled populist message. The findings are striking: trust in political leaders is shaped more by audiovisual and paralinguistic cues—such as tone, gesture, and perceived authenticity—than by populist content itself. Notably, participants reported higher trust when exposed to communication they could not understand than when presented with translated political messaging. These results challenge conventional assumptions about persuasion and highlight the central role of communication form in shaping political judgement.

By Ihsan Yilmaz*, Ana-Maria Bliuc**, Tetsuro Kobayashi*** & John Betts****

Public debate often assumes persuasion comes from ideology, populist rhetoric, or misinformation. When people worry about political manipulation, propaganda, or foreign interference, they usually focus on what is being said. Is a message false? Is it extremist? Is it conspiratorial? Is it anti-democratic?

Those questions matter. But they do not capture the full problem.

Political influence may depend as much on how messages are communicated as on what they say. In the digital attention economy, communication format, emotional cues, and presentation style shape political judgement. Citizens do not encounter political communication as detached analysts. They encounter it as viewers, listeners, social media users, and members of social groups, responding not only to claims and arguments but also to tone, confidence, visual presence, rhythm, repetition, and emotional force. Research has shown that falsehood spreads rapidly online, that emotional processing can increase belief in misleading information, and that anger can heighten partisan vulnerability to political misperceptions (Vosoughi et al., 2018; Martel et al., 2020; Weeks, 2015).  

How Communication Shapes Trust Beyond Content

That matters not only for domestic politics but also for international politics. Strategic narratives research in IR has long argued that actors exercise power by shaping stories about who “we” are, what kind of crisis we face, and what political future is possible (Freedman, 2006; Miskimmon et al., 2013). Sharp power research has shown that authoritarian influence often works not through open persuasion alone but through manipulative, coercive, and opaque forms of projection that distort democratic information environments (Walker, 2018; Nye, 2018; Pinto, 2023). And scholarship on emotions in world politics has demonstrated that fear, resentment, nostalgia, pride, and humiliation are not peripheral to politics. They are part of how power works, both domestically and internationally (Hutchison & Bleiker, 2014; Valentino et al., 2011; Van Rythoven, 2021).  

If this is right, then the key issue is not only whether citizens encounter false claims. It is how political messages are delivered, processed, remembered, and made to feel credible. That is where our pilot research becomes important.

Our pilot study, which serves as the basis for this commentary, examines how a political leader’s communication style shapes trust. In an online experiment, participants (322 UK residents) were exposed to three versions of the same political message, varying in communication richness: a still image of a (Romanian) political leader taken from a video (control condition), the video in Romanian without translation, and a subtitled version containing populist content. The aim was to disentangle the effects of visual and paralinguistic cues—such as tone, gestures, facial expressions, and emotional cadence—from those of semantic content. Put simply, the study asks whether people respond more to how a leader communicates than to what the leader actually says. It measures perceptions of the leader’s credibility, trustworthiness, appeal, and emotional impact, alongside relevant moderating variables.

Media Modality, Memory, and the Construction of Trust

The result is striking. Communication condition significantly affects trust in the candidate. Video with content but no meaning produces the highest trust, while the static picture produces the lowest. Trust in the leader is also higher when people are exposed to communication only (foreign language), compared to when they are exposed to the translated message. Just as importantly, perceptions of populism do not mediate trust in the speaker. Instead, trust appears to be shaped more by delivery cues—such as tone, credibility, authenticity, and leader appeal—than by populist framing alone.

This should make us stop and think.

A dynamic audiovisual performance can make a political figure appear stronger, more sincere, more persuasive, or more leader-like even when audiences cannot understand the words being spoken. A still image, by contrast, strips away much of what creates immediacy and emotional connection. This does not mean content is irrelevant. It means content is not the whole story. Political trust may be built through cues that sit alongside semantic meaning and sometimes outrun it.

The significance of this finding becomes even clearer when placed beside Kobayashi’s broader work on modality, memory, and political processing. The basic point is simple but important: people do not process text, still images, and video in the same way. Different media formats shape attention differently. They influence what is encoded, what is remembered, and what lingers as a political impression. Visual and multimedia formats can strengthen memory and recall, even when the content itself is weak, misleading, or only partly understood. This means that persuasion is not only about the literal content of a message. It is also about how the message enters cognition and what remains afterward.

That insight matters in domestic politics because democratic contestation now unfolds across short-form video, reels, clips, speeches, memes, livestreams, and highly personalized feeds. In such settings, communication style is not a surface feature. It becomes part of the mechanism through which trust is built. A leader who appears authentic may be granted credibility beyond the evidence. A speaker who appears forceful may seem persuasive even when the argument is thin. A compelling audiovisual fragment may leave a stronger impression than a detailed correction delivered later as plain text. Recent work also shows that democratic publics can become receptive to illiberal narratives under certain conditions, including aversion to protest and responsiveness to authoritarian framing (Kobayashi, Toriumi & Yoshida 2025; Kobayashi et al. 2025). 

Strategic Narratives, Emotion, and the Transnational Politics of Influence

But this also matters for foreign policy and IR. Contemporary influence campaigns do not simply try to convince publics through formal argument. They work through strategic narratives, emotional resonance, symbolic performance, and technologically amplified circulation. States and state-aligned actors increasingly compete not only over territory, institutions, or material resources, but also over meaning, perception, and legitimacy. Public diplomacy, strategic communication, soft power, sharp power, and digital authoritarian influence all operate in this wider environment of mediated political judgement (Miskimmon et al., 2013; Walker, 2018; Nye, 2018; Roberts & Oosterom, 2025; NED, 2024).  

The domestic and the international are not separate spheres here. They overlap through digital platforms, diasporas, transnational narratives, and emotionally charged content that travels across borders and is then reinterpreted in local settings. IR scholars have long argued that ideas, norms, and frames do not simply move intact from one place to another. They are localized, contested, adapted, and selectively internalized (Acharya, 2004; Wiener, 2008). That matters enormously today. A communication style that builds trust at home can also be effective abroad. A leader’s visual authenticity, emotional cadence, and symbolic performance can travel transnationally through clips, commentary networks, subtitled fragments, and influencer ecosystems. Narratives that appear domestic can be amplified internationally; narratives projected from abroad can be domesticated by local actors.

This is one reason why the distinction between domestic polarization and foreign influence is often less clear than policymakers assume. Influence is not just broadcast. It is processed through emotion, identity, memory, and media form. That is also why our broader scholarship has focused on how digital politics, civilizational narratives, and sharp-power dynamics travel through both domestic and transnational channels. Yilmaz and Morieson have shown how civilizational narratives are politically mobilized through crisis, victimhood, moral hierarchy, and claims of threatened identity (Yilmaz & Morieson, 2023; Yilmaz & Morieson 2025). Yilmaz and Shakil have shown that soft and sharp power do not circulate as neutral content but are received through affect, identification, and local meaning-making (Yilmaz & Shakil, 2025). Yilmaz, Bliuc, Betts, and Morieson (2025) have argued that foreign interference can remain hidden in plain sight when it works through sharp power rather than obvious coercion.  

The same is true of the work by Bliuc and Betts on online communities, identity, cohesion, and polarization. Bliuc and colleagues have shown how online communities intensify collective identity, emotional alignment, and hostility under certain socio-political conditions (Bliuc et al., 2019; Bliuc et al., 2020; Bliuc, Smith, and Moynihan 2020). Betts and Bliuc have shown how influencers can shape polarization dynamics, and later work by Betts, Bliuc, and Courtney extends this to charismatic digital actors (Betts & Bliuc 2022; Betts et al., 2025). Taken together, this body of scholarship suggests that political persuasion operates through social context, emotional cues, memory, and communication form, not simply ideological content.  

Rethinking Persuasion: Trust, Media Form, and Democratic Resilience in the Digital Age

That is why the pilot matters for IR as much as for political psychology. It offers a small but important piece of evidence about a much larger problem: how trust is manufactured in mediated politics. If citizens can form more trusting evaluations of a political figure from audiovisual performance even when they do not understand the message itself, then we need to rethink what persuasion means in a digital and internationalized public sphere.

The implications are significant.

First, media literacy needs to move beyond the simple binary of true versus false. Citizens need tools to ask harder questions: Why does this message feel persuasive? Why does this speaker seem credible? What role is tone playing in my judgement? What is the visual format doing to my attention and memory? What impression is being created before I have even evaluated the substance of the claim?

Second, policymakers need to treat communication form as a matter of democratic resilience and national security, not merely as a media issue. If audiovisual style can shape trust independently of content, then strategies to counter misinformation and foreign interference cannot focus only on debunking claims after the fact. They must also address the affective and cognitive mechanisms through which trust is built in the first place. This is particularly relevant in democracies facing sustained information pressure from domestic polarization, transnational propaganda, and digitally enabled authoritarian influence. Democratic resilience is not only about institutional robustness. It is also about how citizens process and evaluate political communication under conditions of emotional and informational strain (Lieberman et al., 2021).  

Third, IR needs to take communication psychology more seriously. Strategic narratives are not only elite texts. They are delivered through media systems, performances, visual formats, emotional triggers, and infrastructures of circulation. Sharp power does not only manipulate facts; it manipulates the conditions under which facts are judged, remembered, and trusted. Foreign policy analysis, therefore, needs to pay closer attention to modality, cognition, affect, and platformed attention. A narrative that fails as a written claim may succeed as a clip. A weak argument may become potent when fused with charisma, symbolism, and repetition. In an age of generative AI, synthetic media, and personalized feeds, these questions will only grow more urgent (NED, 2024; Roberts & Oosterom, 2025).  

Conclusion: Hidden in Plain Sight

To support democratic resilience, countering disinformation requires more than factchecking. Democracies must address how political messages influence cognition and emotion. Research priorities should include identifying communication formats that increase susceptibility, understanding how trust is shaped by nonverbal and audiovisual cues, and designing interventions that strengthen public resilience without drifting into censorship or paternalism. That is not only a domestic challenge. It is also a foreign policy challenge, because contemporary influence operations work precisely by blurring the line between internal debate and external manipulation.

The key question is no longer simply, “What messages are citizens exposed to?” It is, “How are those messages delivered and processed?”

If we fail to ask that question, we will continue to underestimate how persuasion works in contemporary politics. And if we continue to treat manipulation only as a problem of obvious lies, we will miss the subtler but often more effective techniques that shape trust, memory, and judgement in plain sight.

---

 

Funding: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [ARC] under Discovery Grant [DP220100829], Religious Populism, Emotions and Political Mobilisation and ARC [DP230100257] Civilisationist Mobilisation, Digital Technologies and Social Cohesion.

---

 

(*) Professor Ihsan Yilmaz is Research Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Research Chair in Islamic Studies and Intercultural Dialogue, and Deputy Director at the Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia. He is a leading scholar of authoritarianism, civilizational populism, digital authoritarianism, political Islam, and transnationalism. His recent research examines the diffusion of authoritarian practices, the weaponization of civilizational narratives, and the emotional and cognitive effects of disinformation in democratic and hybrid regimes.  

(**) Dr. Ana-Maria Bliuc is an Associate Professor of Social and Political Psychology in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the University of Dundee. She joined Dundee in 2019 after holding academic positions at Western Sydney University, Monash University, and the University of Sydney. Her research examines the role of social identity in shaping behavior across health, environmental, and socio-political contexts, including collective action, social change, and political polarization. More recently, her work has focused on online communities and digital environments, investigating how collective identities and behaviors are formed, sustained, and transformed through online interaction. 

(***) Dr. John Betts is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia. He specializes in computational modelling, optimization, simulation, and data science, with applications across the social sciences, health, and industry. His research focuses on understanding complex systems, variability, and resource allocation, and he has contributed to interdisciplinary work on political polarization, online behavior, and agent-based modelling, alongside projects in areas such as medicine and manufacturing.  

(****) Dr. Tetsuro Kobayashi is a Professor in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, Japan. He holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Tokyo. Before joining Waseda University in 2023, he held academic positions at the National Institute of Informatics and City University of Hong Kong and was also a visiting researcher at Stanford University. His research lies at the intersection of political communication, political psychology, and public opinion, with a particular focus on how media environments shape political attitudes and behavior. His work has been published widely in leading journals across political science, communication, and psychology.  

---

 

References

Acharya, A. (2004). “How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism.” International Organization. 58(2): 239–275.

Betts, B. and A.-M. Bliuc. (2022). “The Effect of Influencers on Societal Polarization.” Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference.

Betts, J. M.; A.-M. Bliuc and D. S. Courtney. (2025). “The Effect of Charismatic Influencers on Polarization Online: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach.” Technology in Society.

Bliuc, A.-M.; J. Betts; M. Vergani; M. Iqbal and K. Dunn. (2019). “Collective Identity Changes in Far-Right Online Communities: The Role of Offline Intergroup Conflict.” New Media & Society, 21(8): 1770–1786.

Bliuc, A.-M.; J. M. Betts; N. Faulkner; M. Vergani; R. J. Chow; M. Iqbal and D. Best. (2020). “The Effects of Local Socio-Political Events on Group Cohesion in Online Far-Right Communities.” PLOS ONE, 15(3): e0230302.

Bliuc, A-M.; L. G. E. Smith and T. Moynihan. (2020). “‘You Wouldn’t Celebrate September 11’: Testing Online Polarisation Between Opposing Ideological Camps on YouTube.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 23(6): 827–844.

Freedman, L. (2006). The Transformation of Strategic Affairs. London: Routledge.

Hutchison, E. and R. Bleiker. (2014). “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics.” International Theory, 6(3): 491–514.

Kobayashi, T.; F. Toriumi and M. Yoshida. (2025). “Cross-Ideological Acceptance of the Illiberal Narrative of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests in Japan: Aversion to Protests as a Key Facilitator.” Chinese Journal of Communication.

Kobayashi, T.; Y. Zhou; L. Seki and A. Miura. (2025). “Autocracies Win the Minds of the Democratic Public: How Japanese Citizens Are Persuaded by Illiberal Narratives Propagated by Authoritarian Regimes.” Democratization. 32(6): 1474–1495.

Lieberman, R. C.; S. Mettler and K. M. Roberts, eds. (2021). Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martel, C., G. Pennycook and D. G. Rand. (2020). “Reliance on Emotion Promotes Belief in Fake News.” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1): 47.

Miskimmon, A.; B. O’Loughlin and L. Roselle. (2013). Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. New York: Routledge.

National Endowment for Democracy (NED). (2024). Manufacturing Deceit: How Generative AI Supercharges Information Manipulation.

Nye, J. S. Jr. (2018). “How Sharp Power Threatens Soft Power.” Foreign Affairs, January 24.

Pinto, J. F. (2023). “Populist Sharp Power: How the World Entered in a New Cold War.” In: Politics Between Nations.Cham: Springer.

Roberts, T. and M. Oosterom. (2025). “Digital Authoritarianism: A Systematic Literature Review.” Information Technology for Development, 31(4): 860–884.

Valentino, N. A.; T. A. Brader; E. W. Groenendyk; K. Gregorowicz and V. L. Hutchings. (2011). “Election Night’s Alright for Fighting: The Role of Emotions in Political Participation.” Journal of Politics, 73(1): 156–170.

Van Rythoven, E. (2021). “A Feeling of Unease: Diasporas, Emotions, and Security.” International Political Sociology, 15(2): 187–204.

Vosoughi, S.; D. Roy and S. Aral. (2018). “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science, 359(6380): 1146–1151.

Walker, C. (2018). “What Is ‘Sharp Power’?” Journal of Democracy, 29(3): 9–23.

Weeks, B. E. (2015). “Emotions, Partisanship, and Misperceptions: How Anger and Anxiety Moderate the Effect of Partisan Bias on Susceptibility to Political Misinformation.” Journal of Communication, 65(4): 699–719.

Wiener, A. (2008). The Invisible Constitution of Politics: Contested Norms and International Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yilmaz, I.; A.-M. Bliuc; J. Betts and N. Morieson. (2025). “Foreign Interference Can Be Hidden in Plain Sight: Here’s How Countries Use ‘Sharp Power’ in Australia.” The Conversation.

Yilmaz, I. and K. Shakil. (2025). Reception of Soft and Sharp Powers: Turkey’s Civilizational Populist TV Dramas in Pakistan. Singapore: Springer.

Yilmaz, I. and N. Morieson, eds. (2023). Religions and the Global Rise of Civilizational Populism. Singapore: Springer.

Yilmaz, I. and N. Morieson. (2025). Weaponizing Civilizationalism for Authoritarianism: How Turkey, India, Russia, and China Challenge Liberal Democracy. Singapore: Springer.