Is It That Easy? Reconsidering “Easy” and “Hard” Issues in American Politics

• In Event: Perceptions of Political Parties and Their Effects on Public Opinion

Abstract

The distinction between “easy” and “hard” policy issues has been influential in understanding citizen competence and opinion leadership. Yet, the notion of issue difficulty is surprisingly under-developed and under-tested. We use a nationally representative survey and two pre-registered experiments to develop and validate a new individual-level measure of issue difficulty. With this measure, we show issue difficulty is better understood as a characteristic of individuals, not issues: difficulty consistently varies more between respondents than between issues—even for “easy” issues. Moreover, we find that issue difficulty has zero effect on partisan cue-taking. Instead, issue importance decreases the effect of party cues by as much as 70 percent. Thus, studies showing that issue difficulty moderates party opinion-leadership have likely observed the effects of issue importance. These results problematize the notion of inherent issue characteristics and clarify when party cues can shift public opinion. They also suggest that party cues work—not as informational shortcuts, but—as cues to group norms.

Authors

• Nicholas Carlo Dias, University of Pennsylvania

• Yphtach Lelkes, University of Pennsylvania