Party Cues Research Articles

Foreign Voices, Party Cues, and U.S. Public Opinion about Military Action

Foreign Voices, Party Cues, and U.S. Public Opinion about Military Action

The impact of policy content and party label on policy agreement and candidate support. An analysis on the issue of the integration of immigrants

There is an ongoing debate in the public opinion and voting behaviour literature on whether policy content or party cues determine voters’ opinions and electoral behaviour. This study focuses on the issue of the integration of immigrants, and assesses to what extent the policy content and a radical right party label relate to voters’ likelihood of agreeing with the policy and of voting for the candidate introducing the policy. The analysis, using experimental video data with hypothetical political candidates embedded in a representative Dutch survey (LISS) (N = 3249), reveals that the influence of the radical right label is limited. It only negatively affects the likelihood of supporting a candidate and agreeing with the policy among voters who do not support a mainstream right or radical right party. The content of the policy plays a major role. In particular, a radical right compared with mainstream right policy towards the integration of immigrants decreases the likelihood of agreeing with the policy and supporting the candidate presenting such a policy among non-radical right voters. Radical right voters are substantially more likely to agree with a restrictive migration policy and to support a candidate presenting such a policy than voters of all other parties.

Is the European Union too complicated? Citizens’ lack of information and party cue effectiveness

Previous literature suggests that citizens lack information about European Union politics and need party cues to develop attitudes toward European Union issues. This process would make party positions the cause rather than the consequence of voters’ preferences, reducing the accountability of the political elite. The article tests the premise of this top-down model investigating how issue complexity and citizens’ political knowledge affect party cue effectiveness. The results from both experimental and observational data show that party influence is higher among less knowledgeable citizens. Moreover, well-informed voters have autonomous opinions on easy issues, but they rely on party cues when facing harder ones. Given the low availability of information about European Union politics and the high complexity of the debated issues, parties appear largely able to shape voters’ attitudes.

Conditional Motivated Reasoning

Using motivated reasoning, voters rely on partisanship as a heuristic for evaluating the economy in belief-preserving ways. Yet recent findings show that these motivations may be restricted by a range of contextual factors. We argue that partisan motivations in economic perceptions are moderated by the local economic context. As conditions worsen, a negative information environment leads in-partisans to political ambivalence that reduces confidence in party cues when evaluating the economy. As conditions improve, the motivation for in-partisans to rely on party cues is restored. As positive information has been shown to be less influential for opinion formation than negative information, and out-group members tend to be most prone to motivated reasoning, the economic context should moderate the political motivations of out-partisans to a lesser extent than in-partisans. A multilevel analysis of the 1980 to 2012 American National Election Studies supplemented with state-level data on unemployment and per capita disposable income supports this argument. The effects of in-party attachments on economic perceptions are diminished as economic conditions deteriorate and grow stronger as conditions improve. Moreover, the conditional effects of economic performance on subjective perceptions are stronger for in-partisans than for out-partisans.

Party, policy – or both? Partisan-biased processing of policy arguments in direct democracy

ABSTRACTHow do party cues and policy information affect citizens’ political opinions? In direct democratic settings, this question is particularly relevant. Direct democratic campaigns are information-rich events which offer citizens the opportunity to learn detailed information about a policy. At the same time parties try to influence citizens’ decision procedure by publishing their own positions on the issue. The current debate on whether “party” or “policy” has more impact on political opinions has not yet yielded conclusive results. We examine the effect of policy arguments and party cues on vote intention in two Swiss referendum votes using panel survey data. To the simple dichotomous question of “party cues or policy information” we add an additional twist in asking how party cues affect the processing of policy information through processes of motivated reasoning. We find first that both, policy arguments and party cues, have an independent effect on vote intention. However, in a second part of the analysis, we find strong evidence for partisan-biased processing of policy arguments – that is, voters tend to align their arguments with their preferred party’s position. Our conclusions with regard to the democratic quality of these vote decisions are therefore ambivalent.

Evaluations of the Spitzenkandidaten: The Role of Information and News Exposure in Citizens’ Preference Formation

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections were characterised by a novel element in European Union (EU) politics. For the first time, the major European party families put forward top candidates for President of the European Commission, the so-called <em>Spitzenkandidaten</em>. This paper tests whether this innovation had the potential to—at least partially—alleviate the alleged accountability deficit. We rely on original survey data to assess citizens’ preferences for each of the main <em>Spitzenkandidaten</em>: Jean-Claude Juncker, Martin Schulz, and Guy Verhofstadt. Our research is guided by three questions: what explains whether citizens formulate a preference for a certain <em>Spitzenkandidat</em>? Which factors are responsible for variations in such preferences? And, are these explanations moderated by citizens’ political awareness? We show that three factors enable citizens to formulate a preference for the <em>Spitzenkandidaten</em>: news exposure, general EU political information, and campaign-specific information about the <em>Spitzenkandidaten</em>. Furthermore, we demonstrate that only the most knowledgeable citizens are able to use party cues in their evaluations of the <em>Spitzenkandidaten</em>. The implications of our findings are discussed with reference to the EU’s democratic deficit debate.

The impact of mediated party issue strategies on electoral support

Based on agenda-setting, priming and issue ownership theory, we know that issue ownership and party visibility in the news can be used as strategies to affect electoral support. Thus far, it is, however, unclear whether these effects are independent or work interactively. This study aims to fill this gap. We focus on the Partij voor de Vrijheid, the prominent Dutch right-wing populist party, and draw upon an experimental design in which we exposed a sample of Dutch voters ( N = 600) to media coverage on one of four issues – an owned issue, an unowned issue, an issue owned by another party and a contested issue – featuring either a party cue or not. The results indicate that the impact of issue coverage is moderated by party cues: attention to owned issues and unowned issues increases support only when party cues are present. Attention to contested and trespassing issues does not increase support.

Numeracy and the Persuasive Effect of Policy Information and Party Cues.

Numeric political appeals represent a prevalent but overlooked domain of public opinion research. When can quantitative information change political attitudes, and is this change trumped by partisan effects? We analyze how numeracy-or individual differences in citizens' ability to process and apply numeric policy information-moderates the effectiveness of numeric political appeals on a moderately salient policy issue. Results show that those low in numeracy exhibit a strong party-cue effect, treating numeric information in a superficial and heuristic fashion. Conversely, those high in numeracy are persuaded by numeric information, even when it is sponsored by the opposing party, overcoming the party-cue effect. Our results make clear that overlooking numeric ability when analyzing quantitative political appeals can mask significant persuasion effects, and we build on recent work advancing the understanding of individual differences in public opinion.

Cognitive and partisan mobilization in new democracies

This study investigates the voting behavior of Korean the electorate using Dalton’s four concepts of contemporary voters. We demonstrate that cognitive partisans, who possess strong party identification and high levels of cognitive skills, respond to regional party cue and ideology when voting. Ritual partisans and cognitive partisans behave alike but, for ritual partisans, ideology plays a diminished role due to their low cognitive skills. Two independent groups—apartisans and apoliticals—are prone to swing votes from election to election. Unlike apoliticals, apartisans are influenced by ideology as they possess higher levels of cognitive abilities. Our findings suggest that Dalton’s framework can be useful to understand voting patterns of electorates in new democracies as well as advanced democracies.

Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

Despite generations of research, political scientists have trouble pinpointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment—they are “pretreated.” This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of “pretreatment” from outside the experiment—exposure-based and reputation-based—dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants—who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment—are the most sensitive to this interference from real-world context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.

Media Cues and Citizen Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties

Right-wing populist parties are thriving across Europe. Their success is usually attributed to demand-side voter factors and supply-side factors explaining differences in success between countries and parties, such as the role of the media. This study focuses on the interplay of these factors and adds to the literature on media and political populism by (1) its individual-level focus, accounting for indirect effects, and (2) the use of an experimental design employing a party cue and two right-wing populist cues: an immigrant cue and an anti-politics cue. The authors find effects of certain cues on key attitudes driving right-wing populist support—anti-immigrant attitudes and political cynicism. Furthermore, through these attitudes, the cues indirectly affect probability to vote for such a party.

Non-verbal cues as a test of gender and race bias in politics: the Italian case

Gender and race biases persist in western democracies, with male and white candidates still being the norm. Voters may be more inclined to express sexist and racist attitudes in countries with a traditionally male-dominated political system and a majority-white population. As sexism and racism are notoriously difficult to document, and because many people are unaware of their biases toward social groups, we bypass conventional survey measurement and observe voters’ willingness to support candidates whose physical features have been manipulated to make them appear more prototypically feminine or non-white. We implemented this approach in the context of the 2013 Italian election, by presenting a national sample of Italian voters with pictures of male and female parliamentary candidates – both unknown and well known. Overall, we found no main effects of gender or race bias in political judgment. For Italian voters, party cues are by far the most powerful indicators of out-group status, and therefore the strongest predictors of candidate perception and support. This result may be of particular interest to other political contexts characterized by strong partisan polarization.

The Effects of Issue Salience, Elite Influence, and Policy Content on Public Opinion

When do citizens rely on party cues, and when do they incorporate policy-relevant information into their political attitudes? Recent research suggests that members of the public, when they possess some policy-relevant information, use that information as much as they use party cues when forming political attitudes. We aim to advance this research by specifying conditions that motivate people to use content over cues and vice versa. Specifically, we believe that increased issue salience motivates people to go beyond heuristics and engage in the systematic processing of policy-relevant information. Using data from a survey experiment that isolates the effects of policy-relevant information, party cues, and issue salience, we find that people are more likely to incorporate policy-relevant information when thinking about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a relatively high-salience issue. When thinking about storm-water management, a relatively low-salience issue, people are more likely to rely on party cues.

Physiological responses and partisan bias: beyond self-reported measures of party identification.

People are biased partisans: they tend to agree with policies from political parties they identify with, independent of policy content. Here, we investigate how physiological reactions to political parties shape bias. Using changes in galvanic skin conductance responses to the visual presentation of party logos, we obtained an implicit and physiological measure of the affective arousal associated with political parties. Subsequently, we exposed subjects to classical party cue experiments where the party sponsors of specific policies were experimentally varied. We found that partisan bias only obtains among those exhibiting a strong physiological reaction to the party source; being a self-reported party identifier is not sufficient on its own. This suggests that partisan bias is rooted in implicit, affective reactions.

Is more information always better? Party cues and candidate quality in U.S. judicial elections

We investigate the influence of electoral rules on voting behavior and the quality of judges, using newly collected data on judicial elections and ratings from 39 U.S. states. We find that in partisan elections, where candidates' party affiliations are listed on the ballot, party drives voting behavior and candidate quality has little effect on outcomes. In nonpartisan elections, where party affiliation is not on the ballot, party has a much smaller influence on voting behavior and candidate quality has a substantial effect on outcomes. If the primary task of public officials is not to represent voters' ideology and their decisions have little variability across parties, then we need to seriously consider the potential cost of partisan competition. To the extent that partisan voting behavior crowds out the influence of candidate quality on voting outcomes, the desirability of the partisan election system should be carefully assessed.

Political knowledge in complex information environments

To cast a meaningful ballot, voters ought to have sufficient knowledge of competing parties. As parties often change between elections (e.g., merge, split), they breed electoral complexity, with potential consequences for voter ability to take party cues and make informed decisions. Due to the demands placed on their attention and cognition, voters are generally less capable of taking party cues as parties erratically transform. This finding has several nuances: the impact of party instability depends both on its type and overall degree, as well as on voters' disparate abilities to handle electoral complexity. First, voters tend to know considerably less about new parties and splinters than they do about preexisting parties; yet they are more knowledgeable about newly formed mergers and joint lists. Second, voters who experience only occasional peaks in instability are more adversely affected than voters in new, fluid party systems. Lastly as instability increases, the positive effect of education on political knowledge diminishes, suggesting that even the well-educated have difficulty sorting through electoral alternatives as parties change. The overall loss in knowledge associated with high instability speaks to the important role political parties have in facilitating the acquisition of electoral information and for political representation more broadly.

Voting on Europe, again and again: Stability and change in the Irish experience with EU referendums

This article is about comparative voting behaviour in referendums on the EU and explores variation within one country rather than variations across countries. This enables us to control for broad national context while allowing variations in the immediate referendum context, in terms of campaign intensity and incumbency. It analyses voting behaviour in the many referendums that have taken place in Ireland. The major part of the analysis deals with the five referendums since 2001, as this allows the use of the same measurement of EU support and the use of post referendum surveys. Most attention is paid to attitude to the EU, party support and satisfaction with the incumbent government, reflecting the main debates in the literature on the issues and party cues. The relative importance of each is said to depend on contextual factors such as campaign intensity and economic strength. We find both party cues and issues matter consistently, and suggestive evidence that incumbency matters to the effectiveness of cues given by the two main pro-EU parties but the major finding is that variations in the factors driving voting behaviour in different Irish polls on Europe are slight and barely significant.

Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization

When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.

Perceived Motives in the Political Arena

People care about more than the substance of policy outcomes. They also care about how political decisions are made. In this article, I report findings from national surveys and two survey experiments that shed light on the factors that affect how people attribute motives to politicians. I find that party cues, policy preferences, and other factors affect which motives people see as the most important explanations for a representative’s behavior. I also find suggestive evidence that people are not strictly averse to representatives who are motivated by political self-interest. Instead, they appear to be more concerned with the extent to which a representative is motivated by his or her genuinely held preferences and a desire to serve the public. The findings constitute an important step toward understanding how people attribute motives in the political arena and the potential consequences of these judgments about what drives politicians’ behavior. Critics accuse Joe Biden of running for President for political reasons. Veteran presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) is once again facing criticism that his bid for the nation’s highest office is based solely on political reasons. “This campaign is nothing more than a naked power-grab by a man who wants only to pursue his own leadership agendas by heading the nation’s executive branch . . ..” Biden, who encountered similar accusations during his first presidential run in 1988, once again declined to respond to the allegations, only saying that he wished to make America a stronger nation and a better place to live.

Wanting What Is Fair: How Party Cues and Information About Income Inequality Affect Public Support for Taxes

Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States, with potentially negative social, economic, and political consequences. Governments can use redistributive tax policies to combat inequality, but doing so requires public support. When will voters support redistributive tax policies? We address this question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about tax policies in a real-world context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, information about rising income inequality, both, or neither type of information. We find that when citizens are given information about income inequality, they connect it to their views on redistributive tax policies. We also find that inequality information can induce Republicans to support a tax increase that their party opposes. These results challenge the prominent view of citizens as too ignorant to connect information about inequality to specific taxes. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate about inequality can influence tax policy opinions.