Christine E. Meltzer, Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media
https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/106550, PDF
Introduction: Why Intersectionality Matters
Intersectionality provides a lens to understand how multiple identities overlap and interact to shape political life. Rather than existing in isolation, categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, and migration status intersect in ways that condition political participation, representation, and perception. Intersectionality denotes the ways identity categories intersect to produce distinct experiences and requires moving beyond single-axis theorizing in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of social and cultural phenomena (Cho et al., 2013). Such combinations of categories illustrate what I refer to here as “identity bundles”: intersecting categories (e.g., origin × gender × migration type) that are activated together in media portrayals and cannot be reduced to single markers. In fact, research in political communication has long demonstrated that race (Hutchings & Valentino, 2004) and gender (Andrich & Domahidi, 2024; Van Der Pas & Aaldering, 2020) matter in how politicians and citizens (Lind & Meltzer, 2020) are covered and evaluated. Intersectionality advances these insights by showing how these categories multiply overlap with structural locations of power (Cho et al., 2013).
The stakes are clear: who is made visible, how groups are framed, and how audiences respond all depend on intersecting identities. Ignoring this not only overlooks marginalized groups but distorts our understanding of media effects and democratic inclusion. Yet political communication has tended to treat identity superficially, rarely asking what is learned by centering identity (McGregor et al., 2025). This is even more acute for intersectional identities, which are seldom addressed in their own right. The omission is consequential: without an intersectional perspective, political communication risks mischaracterizing how messages are produced, circulated, and received. This contribution highlights that intersectional identity cannot be treated as a side note to political communication but a mechanism shaping visibility, framing, and effects.
Intersectional Visibility and Framing
Intersectional visibility gaps
Visibility in media is not simply about whether political actors appear, but about which combinations of identities are present or absent. Communication research now conceptualizes visibility not only as presence but also as valuation. A recent review highlights that feminist and critical race perspectives see visibility as structured by intersectional power relations, yet systematic analyses of absence remain rare (Stehle et al., 2024). Research consistently shows that women remain structurally underrepresented across news systems (Beckers et al., 2024), and are almost absent from high-visibility roles, reflecting how age and gender intersect to exacerbate exclusion (Jürgens et al., 2022). In migration coverage, migrant women are doubly marginalized, appearing far less frequently than migrant men or majority women (Lind & Meltzer, 2020). Recent research further shows that visibility interacts with partisanship: highly visible Democratic women attract more negative coverage, while Republican women receive less coverage despite similar offices (Andrich, 2025). These examples underline that visibility gaps are not additive but intersectional: being a woman and a migrant, or a woman and Republican, produces qualitatively different patterns of (in)visibility.
Asymmetric framing
How individual and social groups are framed depends systematically on intersecting identity cues. In electoral coverage, women politicians, especially in high-status offices or addressing “hard” issues such as the economy or security, are less often framed through substantive expertise and more often through personality or novelty than their men counterparts (Andrich & Domahidi, 2024; Van Der Pas & Aaldering, 2020). In crime reporting, gendered violence is overwhelmingly covered episodically, yet perpetrator origin or race shifts these patterns. Violence by migrant or non-White men is more often explained through cultural or religious traditions while violence by White or non-migrant men is individualized and excused (Chagnon, 2020; Meltzer, 2023; Pepin, 2016). Immigration coverage similarly applies differentiated repertoires. Men refugees are more frequently portrayed in threatening contexts such as crime or terrorism, while women refugees appear predominantly in victimization or humanitarian frames (Blumell & Cooper, 2019; Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017). Comparative reviews further suggest that distinct groups are associated with distinct types of threat: Roma with economic, North Africans with cultural or security, and Eastern Europeans with welfare-related concerns (Eberl et al., 2018).
These dynamics of intersectional biased visibility and framing underscore that intersectional identity bundles, rather than single categories, determine both who enters public consideration and what interpretive frames audiences receive once they do. Visibility and framing thus operate together as mechanisms that preconfigure subsequent media effects, shaping not only whether groups are seen but also how they are understood.
Intersectional Media Effects
Mechanisms
Intersectional portrayals influence how audiences respond. Evidence from adjacent literature show that race × gender asymmetry affects perceived trustworthiness (Valmori et al., 2023), determine person–position fit (Hall et al., 2015), perceptions of and reactions to displays of remorse in jurors’ decision-making processes (Zhao & Rogalin, 2024), and decisions to shoot criminal suspects (Plant et al., 2011). These studies show how identity bundles distinctly shape perception, attitudes, and behavior. Yet surprisingly few works in political communication have tested such dynamics directly.
It has been shown that origin and migration type interact to produce divergent evaluations: Middle Eastern refugees tend to elicit more negative orientations among right-leaning audiences, while African refugees foster more positive reactions among left-leaning audiences (Meltzer et al., 2025). Beyond immediate reactions, repeated exposure can consolidate such asymmetric responses into more stable perceptions. Research on crime news shows that the chronic overrepresentation of Black suspects fosters durable associations between Blackness and criminality, leading to harsher culpability judgments for Black suspects whereas White suspects are more readily excused. Such findings show that identity cues become chronically accessible, shaping judgments over time. Importantly, these entrenched responses do not remain confined to social group evaluations. Exposure to racialized crime news has been shown to prime racial attitudes that spill over into broader political judgments, including evaluations of political candidates (Valentino, 1999). This shows that intersectional cues recalibrate the criteria by which citizens evaluate political leaders, situating them at the center of political communication research.
Intersectional dynamics extend beyond portrayals to how users themselves engage with media. Research shows that racial identity conditions political expression on social media, with White people (vs. Black, Asian, and Hispanic people) having a higher probability of engaging in different forms of political expression (Lane et al., 2022). Asymmetries further surface in disproportionate online harassment against (younger) women and minorities (Chen et al., 2018; Vogels, 2021) Gehrke and Pasitselska (2024) identify identity propaganda, logics of exclusion, and gendered disinformation as mechanisms through which false or misleading content exploits identity-based cues and deepens divides. Taken together, these studies show that intersectional cues matter not only in how groups are portrayed, but also in how citizens negotiate, reproduce, and resist identity-based communication online.
Conditionality
Media effects of intersectional portrayals are conditional rather than universal. Audience predispositions moderate how cues are received, but the identity bundle itself is part of the treatment. For instance, left-leaning respondents report more positive views with increased exposure to migration news, while right-leaning respondents exhibit more negative responses, particularly toward Middle Eastern refugees (Meltzer et al., 2025). Thus, the same narrative can reverse its effects depending on the group portrayed and the audience. A portrayal of Middle Eastern refugee men framed through threat and populist rhetoric may generate fear and hostility among right-leaning audiences, while coverage of refugee women from Africa in humanitarian contexts may foster compassion among left-leaning audiences. Intersectional identity bundles thus operate as triggers that interact with predispositions to shift both the strength and direction of effects. Recognizing this conditionality is crucial for political communication: it highlights that representation is not a background factor but part of the treatment that shapes how citizens evaluate both marginalized groups and political leaders. This pattern is consistent with broader evidence showing that predispositions, values, and motivated reasoning condition media effects (Andrews et al., 2017; Avdagic & Savage, 2021; Schemer, 2012; Shen & Edwards, 2005).
In addition, this conditionality extends beyond message reception to how users express themselves online. Studies of political expression on social media illustrate similar audience-based dynamics. Previous results indicate that posting about political issues had little independent effect on support for Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter, but political expression interacted with levels of racial resentment. Among less resentful users, frequent expression was linked to reduced support for BLM, whereas no such effect appeared among high-resentment users (Coles & Saleem, 2021). Together, these findings illustrate that identity-based predispositions condition not only responses to media portrayals but also the dynamics of user expression.
Towards an Intersectional Political Communication
Advancing an intersectional political communication requires both conceptual and methodological innovation. Intersectionality should not be understood as endlessly multiplying categories, but as a framework to refine existing theories and to explain why some effects appear stronger, weaker, or absent. Methodological work shows that different strategies are possible for managing complexity, whether comparing across categories, focusing within, or challenging categories altogether (McCall, 2005). This flexibility underscores that intersectionality is not about cataloguing every possible intersection, but about identifying which ones matter most for political outcomes. Intersectionality also offers a way to extend established theories of media effects. The critical media effects framework demonstrates how power, context, and intersecting identities can be systematically integrated into agenda-setting, framing, and priming research (Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020). Null findings should therefore not be discarded too quickly; they may indicate that categories have been specified too broadly, masking differential effects across identity bundles. In this sense, intersectionality is both a theory-building tool and a diagnostic lens for refining political communication models.
Methodological implications follow. Measuring at scale through text and visual pipelines allows for systematic analysis of intersectional cues. Stimulus construction in experiments should explicitly cross identity cues while holding other features constant to isolate interactive effects. Intersectional political communication can also learn from adjacent fields. For example, recent work on consciousness-raising practices in social movements demonstrates how race is reconfigured not simply as a demographic marker but as a relational category embedded in political education and organization. Such perspectives from critical ethnic studies and feminist of color scholarship remind us that methodological rigor requires theoretical openness: intersectionality cannot be fully captured by crossing categories alone but also by tracing how identities are cultivated and contested through communicative practice (Grover & Kuo, 2023). At the same time, field-level constraints need attention. The discipline of political communication has been critiqued for reproducing structural exclusions in its own practices of authorship and citation (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Freelon et al., 2023), and for continuing to privilege WEIRD-based models while treating Global South work as supplementary rather than as theory-generating (Rossini, 2023). Limited diversity produces blind spots: what is treated as a relevant category, which intersections are tested, and which contexts are theorized as generalizable. A field that remains centered on WEIRD scholars risks narrowing its own questions and overlooking variation that is politically consequential. Recognizing these constraints is part of developing a truly intersectional field.
A future agenda follows from these considerations. Scholars should disaggregate broad categories, study identity bundles directly, and test systematic frame × identity interactions. Analyses should also trace cumulative exposure across platforms, recognizing that intersectional portrayals circulate in hybrid media systems. Building shared infrastructure (stimulus banks, coding standards, transparency tools) would enable cumulative progress. At the same time, effects research must be contextualized: media influence is always shaped by historical and cultural conditions (Rojas & Valenzuela, 2019). While most studies cited in this paper focus on intersections of gender and origin, comparable interaction mechanisms may apply to other bundles (e.g., socioeconomic status, sexuality, age). Extending systematic tests to these domains will broaden the scope and validity of effects research in political communication.
Conclusion: Representation Is Part of the Treatment
The preceding sections have shown how intersectional portrayals structure visibility and framing, how they activate mechanisms of media effects, and how audience predispositions condition these outcomes. By showing that the same message can produce opposite effects depending on the intersectional identities portrayed and the predispositions of audiences, this line of research underscores that intersectionality is not simply a question of representation but a central mechanism of political attitude formation and thus – mitigated via democratic processes – influence which policies might be implemented affecting the groups in question. As such, intersectionality should be placed at the core of political communication scholarship, both theoretically and methodologically, to better account for the heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory ways in which media shape democratic opinion formation. Representation is not background but part of the treatment itself. By taking intersectional identity seriously, we sharpen theoretical explanation and empirical prediction. At stake are both academic rigor and democratic inclusion: who is seen, heard, and counted in the mediated public sphere.
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Author
Christine E. Meltzer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Journalism and Communication Research at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. Her research examines the role of media in shaping perceptions of social inequality and intergroup relations. She focuses particularly on the media representation of migration, refugees, and gender, the coverage of violence against women, and the portrayal of women in popular culture such as music videos.