Do Party Cues Matter in Real-World News? A New Experimental Approach

• In Event: It's My Party: Cues, the News, and Political Communication

Abstract

How important are party cues for public opinion? Recent experimental studies show that party cue effects fluctuate widely depending on contextual features of the stimulus material, like the choice of issue and the amount of policy information available. This contingency confronts researchers with a question of external validity: How well do contextual conditions in prior studies reflect the conditions party cues are embedded in when citizens meet them in the real world? Insofar real-world conditions differ systematically from contextual features of earlier work, researchers may produce estimates that severely misjudge the ability of party cues to sway public opinion under realistic settings. To address problems of external validity, we present a novel experimental design testing the power of party cues in real-world news. The design consists of three steps. First, to produce a representative set of “real-world” conditions we randomly sample hundreds of news articles covering policy proposals from top US newspapers and online news sites. Second, we create two versions of each article: One in which party cues are present and one in which party cues are masked. Third, we use the two versions as treatment material in a large-scale, factorial survey experiment with over 4,000 US participants. This experimental design allows us to estimate a “true” party cue effect that averages across all the different features of the news articles, but also to examine which features that enhance and reduce the effect. Finally, our study also presents participants with stimulus material from a number of well-known party cue studies. This study feature allows us to compare directly the size of party cue effects in real-world versus artificial research settings.

Authors

• Rasmus Skytte, Aarhus University

• Mathias Osmundsen