Party over Pocketbook? How Party Cues Influence Opinion When Citizens Have a Stake in Policy

Rune Slothuus,Martin Bisgaard

doi:10.1017/s0003055421000332

Abstract

Do political parties influence opinion when citizens have a personal stake in policy? With an experimental design that exploits a naturally occurring, sharp variation in party cues, we study the effects of party cues during a collective bargaining conflict over the salary and work rights for public employees in Denmark. Even in this context—where the self-interest of public employees was strongly mobilized and where their party went against it—we find that party cues move opinion among partisans at least as much as in previous studies. But party cues do not lead citizens to go against their self-interest. Rather, we show that party cues temper the pursuit of self-interest among public employees by moderating the most extreme policy demands. These findings highlight an unappreciated potential of political parties to moderate—not fuel—extreme opinion.

Highlights

A long-standing finding in public opinion research is that party cues—information about what positions political parties take on policy issues—influence citizens’ policy opinions: citizens become more supportive of a policy when they learn that their party endorses it (Leeper and Slothuus 2014)
We used two types of survey questions to validate that public employees did see that their self-interest was at stake in the collective bargaining conflict
Public employees expressed very high support for the unions’ demands, further validating they did see that their self-interest was at stake

Summary

Introduction

A long-standing finding in public opinion research is that party cues—information about what positions political parties take on policy issues—influence citizens’ policy opinions: citizens become more supportive of a policy when they learn that their party endorses it (Leeper and Slothuus 2014). Our research design exploits a naturally occurring, sharp variation in party cues during a contentious collective bargaining conflict in Denmark where the self-interest of public employees was clearly at stake and where major political parties went against it. To test the effects of party cues among public employees in this context, we designed an experiment and embedded it in a national online survey in Denmark.

Results

Conclusion