Elite Cues and Economic Policy Attitudes: The Mediating Role of Economic Hardship

Charlotte Cavaillé,Anja Neundorf

doi:10.1007/s11109-021-09768-w

Abstract

Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes.

Highlights

An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Annual Conferences of MPSA (Chicago, April 10–14, 2013)
We are grateful to participants of Harvard Political Economy, Harvard American Politics and Harvard Political Psychology workshops, the Joint Empirical Social Sciences (JESS) seminar at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, the Research Forum Political and Social Science at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Political Economy seminar at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, the Nuffield Politics Seminar, University of Oxford in particular for taking the time to comment on an earlier drafts of this paper
A strong assumption in American public opinion research is that changes in mass preferences in a given issue area follow from changes in whether and how elites agree or disagree over this particular issue

Summary

A Simple Addendum to Zaller’s Theory of the Survey Response

We start from Zaller and Feldman’s theory of the survey response, which underpins the majority of studies on opinion formation and change. We expect a decrease in the share of individuals who appear left-wing on redistributive and economic issues This change should be especially important among Labour sympathizers who pay attention to politics and notice the change in elite cues. Because many are Labour sympathizers, reliance on the partisan heuristic encourages them to respond to right-wing cues by changing their survey responses Given their existing left-wing issue position, predispositional consistency pushes them to resist. To predict how cross-pressured individuals will behave, we turn to material self-interest: Prediction 2 Among people with left-wing attitudes on economic issues, those who have experienced a negative economic shock are more likely to resist party cues and less likely to experience a right-wing shift in attitudinal response patterns.

Results

Objective material conditions

Discussion