Party Cues Research Articles

The Moderating Role of Affective Polarization on Party Cues: The Case of the Prostitution Ban

Affective polarization is a recent yet widespread phenomenon in democracies that significantly impacts various aspects of politics. In this paper, we argue that it can also shape citizens’ political beliefs through party cues. Using a panel survey experiment in Spain, we examine the extent to which partisan signals influence citizens’ attitudes toward a non-party- branded issue, specifically the ban on prostitution, and how affective polarization moderates this effect. Our results underscore the role of affective polarization in moderating the influence of partisan cues, particularly among highly polarized individuals. These findings highlight the capacity of affective polarization not only to deepen political divisions but also to expand the scope of partisan influence to non-politicized and neutral issues, offering new insights into its potential impact on attitude formation and decision-making.

Ballot Box Representation: Spatial Voting and the Effects of Information in Direct Democracy Elections

AbstractIn states and localities with direct democracy, citizens can advance their policy interests without the aid of elected officials. Research documenting citizens’ lack of political knowledge raises questions about their ability to do so. We conduct three studies during real-world direct democracy elections to determine whether citizens choose alternatives (the ballot proposal or status quo) that are closest to their ideological positions and whether political information improves this outcome. Using original surveys, our first two studies estimate citizens’ ideological positions and show that citizens regularly choose alternatives that are closest to these positions. Using a survey experiment, our third study indicates that political information (party cues, policy information, and spatial maps) further improves such spatial voting. These results demonstrate citizens’ capacity to advance their policy interests in direct democracy elections and identify conditions under which political information strengthens the relationship between citizens’ policy interests and choices about ballot propositions.

Partisanship and the Pandemic: How and Why Americans Followed Party Cues on COVID-19

The United States underperformed its potential in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors use original survey data from April 2020 to March 2022 to show that political partisanship may have contributed to this inconsistent response by distinguishing elites and citizens who took the crisis seriously from those who did not. This division was not inevitable; when the crisis began, Democrats and Republicans differed little in their viewpoints and actions relative to COVID-19. However, partisans increasingly diverged when their preferred political leaders provided them with opposing cues. The authors outline developments in party politics over the last half century that contributed to partisan division on COVID-19, most centrally an anti-expertise bias among Republicans. Accordingly, Republicans’ support for mitigation measures, perception of severity of COVID-19, and support for vaccines gradually decreased after the initial outbreak. Partisan differences also showed up at the state level; Trump's vote share in 2016 was negatively associated with mask use and positively associated with COVID-19 infections. Diverging elite cues provided fertile ground for the partisan pandemic, underscoring the importance of political accountability even in an era of polarization.

Estimators for Topic-Sampling Designs

Abstract When researchers design an experiment, they usually hold potentially relevant features of the experiment constant. We call these details the “topic” of the experiment. For example, researchers studying the impact of party cues on attitudes must inform respondents of the parties’ positions on a particular policy. In doing so, researchers implement just one of many possible designs . Clifford, Leeper, and Rainey (2023. “Generalizing Survey Experiments Using Topic Sampling: An Application to Party Cues.” Forthcoming in Political Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09870-1) argue that researchers should implement many of the possible designs in parallel—what they call “topic sampling”—to generalize to a larger population of topics. We describe two estimators for topic-sampling designs: First, we describe a nonparametric estimator of the typical effect that is unbiased under the assumptions of the design; and second, we describe a hierarchical model that researchers can use to describe the heterogeneity. We suggest describing the heterogeneity across topics in three ways: (1) the standard deviation in treatment effects across topics, (2) the treatment effects for particular topics, and (3) how the treatment effects for particular topics vary with topic-level predictors. We evaluate the performance of the hierarchical model using the Strengthening Democracy Challenge megastudy and show that the hierarchical model works well.

Do Parties Matter? Party Positions and European Voters’ Attitudes toward Economic and Political Globalization

Abstract To what extent do party positions influence voters’ attitudes toward the economic and political aspects of globalization? Initially an issue following a left-right dimension of conflict, globalization increasingly divides mainstream from nonmainstream parties. In this study, I argue that parties help citizens form opinions on globalization issues. I then use data on voters’ attitudes and party positions on globalization to test this supply-side theory of globalization attitudes on both economic and political dimensions. Holding demand-side factors such as economic self-interest and predispositions/values constant, I find that party positions strongly affect voters’ views on economic and political globalization, with the effect being similar to that of education. Moreover, I find that the effect of cues from left- and right-populist parties is much more negative than that of mainstream parties, replicating previous elite-level findings on the positioning of these party families. Finally, green party cues show conflicting results for the economic and political dimensions, with green cues affecting voters negatively on economic globalization but positively on political globalization. The findings in this study call for a deeper exploration of the supply-side determinants of globalization attitudes.

The Reverse Backlash: How the Success of Populist Radical Right Parties Relates to More Positive Immigration Attitudes.

What is the relationship between the electoral success of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) and public attitudes toward immigration? Previous research suggests that PRRP success can lead to more negative attitudes due to the breaking down of antiprejudice norms and more prominent anti-immigration party cues. However, we argue that greater PRRP success could have a positive relationship with immigration attitudes, reflecting negative partisanship, polarization, and a desire to reemphasize antiprejudice norms, which we call a "reverse backlash effect." Using the best available electoral and public opinion data across the last thirty years in twenty-four European countries, our TSCS analyses show the predominance of such "reverse backlash effects" across several operationalizations of PRRP success. Our argument has important consequences for the understanding of possible PRRP effects on public opinion, as well as attitudinal formation via party cueing and social norms more generally.

Political expertise, ecological rationality and party cues

Abstract Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.

The Influence of Flooding Imagery and Party Cues on Perceived Threat, Collective Efficacy, and Intentions for Political Action to Address Climate Change

This study investigates how episodic and thematic flooding imagery and political party cues in climate change news stories influence risk perceptions, collective efficacy perceptions, and intended political action. We found that imagery and party cues had significant total effects on perceived flooding threat but not on perceived climate change threat. Specifically, episodic imagery (but not thematic imagery) increased perceived flooding threat, and party cues lowered perceived threat. Perceived threat was positively associated with collective efficacy, which, in turn, was positively associated with intended political action. Both imagery and party cues had significant indirect effects on perceived efficacy and intended action.

Does issue importance attenuate partisan cue-taking?

AbstractAre cues from party leaders so important that they can cause individuals to change their own issue positions to align with the party's position? Recent work on the importance of party cues suggests they do, especially given the literature on partisanship as a strong and persistent group identity. However, in this paper we test the limits of those partisan cues. Using a unique two-wave panel survey design we find that the effect of party cues is moderated by the prior level of importance individuals place on an issue. We find that when a person believes an issue area to be more important, party cues are less likely to move that citizen's position, particularly when the cue goes against partisan ideological norms. Our results show evidence that an individual's own issue positions—at least the important ones—can be resilient in the face of party cues.

Putting partisan influence into political context: How initial policy popularity and party attachment shape the effect of party cues

Parties and their actions almost always shape the preferences, attitudes, and behaviour of their voters. However, does partisan influence over public opinion apply to all policy proposals regardless of their initial popularity and to all voters regardless of their degree of partisan attachment? This question is addressed in the real-world context of Finland, where the government enacted two reforms at the same time: an initially popular reform extending the age of compulsory education, and an initially unpopular removal of the ‘retirement tube’ for older laid-off workers. An original panel survey asked respondents about their attitudes before and after the government actions, finding that while voters of government parties increasingly tended to support the enacted policies, the magnitude of opinion change depended on voters’ initial policy preferences and party attachment. Strong party attachment led to government voters increasing their support for a reform that they initially opposed. In contrast, those with weaker partisan attachments tended to alter their preferences for an initially popular reform. These findings are relevant for understanding partisan influence over public opinion in a broader political context.

Partisans like any other? How populist supporters assess the economy when their party is in office

AbstractPopulist supporters have been found to take cues from populist incumbents. Yet, little is known about how they incorporate party cues in their political beliefs when populists are in office. This research note argues that (1) citizens who identify with populist parties engage in partisan motivated reasoning – that is, they are driven by the desire to be consistent with their partisan allegiances – and that (2) they engage in partisan motivated reasoning more intensely than their non-populist counterparts because populist party cues strongly prompt them to process biased information. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, it is evidenced that populist supporters express much warmer economic views when their parties hold power. Warm economic views are also found to increase significantly more in accordance with strength of partisanship and exposure to political information for populist supporters than for non-populist supporters when their respective parties govern. Results highlight a mechanism by which populist incumbents are likely to remain attractive despite their poor economic record. They have implications for our understanding of the mainstreaming of populist parties in Europe.

The partisan heuristic and the voters’ knowledge: The essential role of the information environment

The low-information rationality theory expects voters with low political knowledge to make more use of the partisan heuristic than those with high knowledge. However, empirical studies on decision making in direct democracy observe a positive correlation between political knowledge and the use of party cues. We resolve this tension between theory and empirical evidence by demonstrating that the relationship between political knowledge and the use of party cues is conditional on the information environment. We provide evidence for this hypothesis by exploiting a natural experiment in Switzerland and analyze a large variety of direct democratic votes. The results show that voters with lower levels of political knowledge tend to align less with their preferred party because they often have a wrong perception of their preferred party’s vote recommendation. However, if information on parties’ position is easily available, their vote choice is at least as much in line with their preferred party as among those with high knowledge. This suggests that in such an information environment voters with low political knowledge strongly rely on the partisan heuristic. Our research note supports the low-information rationality theory and this way contributes to the literature on the quality of political opinion formation and the political psychology of reasoning and decision making.

Elite communication and affective polarization among voters

How does elite communication influence affective polarization between partisan groups? Drawing on the literature on partisan source cues, we expect that communication from in- or outgroup party representatives will increase affective polarization. We argue that polarized social identities are reinforced by partisan source cues, which bias perceptions of elite communication and result in increased intergroup differentiation. Further, we expect that the effect of such source cues is greater for voters with stronger partisan affinities. To evaluate our hypotheses, we performed a survey experiment among about 1300 voters in Sweden. Our analyses show that individuals who received a factual political message with a source cue from an in- or outgroup representative exhibited higher affective polarization, especially when they already held strong partisan affinities. This suggests that political elites can increase affective polarization by reinforcing existing group identities, and that this occurs in conjunction with biased interpretation of elite communication. The results improve our understanding of how political elites can influence affective polarization and add to previous research on party cues and attitude formation by demonstrating that such source cues can also increase intergroup differentiation.

Why we stopped listening to the other side: how partisan cues in news coverage undermine the deliberative foundations of democracy

AbstractRecent theorizing on deliberative democracy has put political listening at the core of meaningful democratic deliberation. In the present experiment (N = 827), we investigated whether news media can improve diverse political listening in the United States via a reduction in party cue salience. Although Republican (Democratic) participants showed a strong preference for listening to speeches given by Republican (Democratic) politicians when party cues were highly salient, this bias in selective political listening was reduced or even absent when news items provided no or only low-salience cues. Conditional process analysis indicated that (automatically activated) implicit and (overtly expressed) explicit party attitudes mediated this effect. There are important implications: Current journalism practices tend to exacerbate tribal us-vs-them thinking by emphasizing partisan cues, nudging citizens toward not listening to political ideas from the other political camp. A more helpful news-choice architecture tones down partisan language, nudging citizens toward more diverse political listening.

Before the Party Hijacks: The Limited Role of Party Cues in Appraisal of Low-Salience Policies—Experimental Evidence

AbstractWhat shapes Americans’ policy preferences: partisanship or policy content? While previous studies have addressed this question, many of them focused on high-salience policies. This raises an identification challenge because the content of such policies contains party cues. The current study employs a diverse set of low-salience policies to discern the unique effects of party cues and policy content, before the issues are “hijacked” by the parties. These policies are embedded in an original conjoint experiment administered among a national US sample. The design enables me to assess the effects of policy content and partisan sponsorship orthogonally. Contrary to previous studies, I find that respondents are attentive to policy content on low-salience issues, and it influences their policy preferences similarly or even more than party cues, across policy domains. Moreover, the support patterns and levels of Democrats and Republicans for many low-salience policies are similar. Party cues, by contrast, polarize partisans’ preferences across domains.

Can People Use Party Cues to Assess Policymaker Positions? Ecological Rationality and Political Heuristics

Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives’ voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives’ votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested.

Anchoring Political Preferences: The Psychological Foundations of Status Quo Bias and the Boundaries of Elite Manipulation

Public policy is often about numbers that affect people’s lives in fundamental ways. Given the central importance of numbers, we examine anchoring, a heuristic in which people are influenced by an initial number in expressing a preference. Across a series of experiments and three unique surveys, we find evidence of anchoring effects, but not uniformly so. In contrast to experiments in psychology and behavioral economics, we find no evidence that irrelevant or arbitrary anchors shape policy preferences. Yet, when provided politically relevant anchors that clearly correspond to the policy proposal, we find evidence of strong effects, even in the face of party cues or in the absence of a status quo policy point. Taken together, our results demonstrate that there is a psychological explanation for why the status quo occupies a powerful position in policy debates as well as why agenda setting is so influential.

Non-transformative climate policy options decrease conservative support for renewable energy in the US

Motivated by ongoing partisan division in support of climate change policy, this paper investigates whether, among self-identifying liberals and conservatives, the mere presence of a non-transformative climate policy such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), lowers support for a renewable energy (RE) policy. To interrogate this question, we use a survey experiment asking 2374 respondents about their support for a RE policy when presented with the RE policy alone, and when presented alongside a CCS policy whose funding and implementation leverage independent funding sources. We find that among conservatives, the presence of a CCS policy lowers support for RE. Furthermore, despite the lack of apparent political party cues, when presented with the policy-pair, conservatives tend to view the RE policy in more partisan terms, specifically, less supported by Republicans. Additional experimental conditions with explicit party cues reinforce this interpretation. These findings suggest that the triggering of partisan perceptions even without explicit partisan cues—what we call political anchoring—might be a key impediment to bipartisan support of climate solutions in the U.S. context.

Negative Party Identification and the Use of Party Cues in the Direct Democratic Context

The use of party cues is a fundamental process of how voters adopt policy preferences. While research has shown that party identification is an important driver of political attitudes in general and policy positions in particular, we know little about how negative party identification (identifying as an opponent to a party) impacts voters’ political preferences. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by combining an experimental and observational empirical analysis of the effect of negative party identification on voters’ issue preferences in the context of direct democratic decision‐making. First, we analyze a survey experiment conducted during a real‐world campaign on affordable housing for a popular ballot in Switzerland. Using continuous measures of party identification, we show a causal relationship between negative party identification and voters’ policy preferences. Second, we use longitudinal observational data of vote choice on direct democratic policy proposals and show that voters adopt policy preferences that contrast with the policy positions of parties they oppose. In sum, the two complementary designs show that voters tend to position themselves not only in alignment with their preferred parties but also in opposition to parties with which they negatively identify. Furthermore, the results indicate that, when adopting policy preferences, negative cues may carry as much weight as positive party cues. Our analysis has important implications for understanding voters’ adoption of policy preferences in general and specifically in the direct democratic context.

The effect of party identification and party cues on populist attitudes

In recent years, a wave of populist leaders has emerged in many democratic countries, including the United States. Previous studies have argued that populist rhetoric matters for leaders’ electoral support because the public has populist attitudes, which are activated in contexts of failure of democratic governance or economic crises. This paper investigates the opposite causal direction and argues that people’s support for populist ideas can be an effect rather than a cause of leaders’ electoral support. People who support a candidate due to the candidate’s party affiliation or policy position tend to support or oppose populist or anti-populist messages if they learn that the candidate of the party they identify with supports that message. The paper investigates the argument with an experiment that randomly assigns (anti-)populist messages and a cue about the candidate that supports the message. The experiment shows that voters’ party identification largely affects support for both populist and anti-populist messages.