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

• In Event: Source Credibility and Partisan Cues

Abstract

How important are party cues for public opinion? While the literature on party cues has grown rapidly following the ‘experimental revolution,' (see Bullock 2019 for an overview) it offers no general answer: Party cue effects fluctuate widely across experiments, and they are highly sensitive to contextual features of the treatment material. For instance, effects sizes depend on whether the treatment material (typically news stories) includes policy information and interest group cues (Gerber et al. 2014), on how salient (Ciuk & Yost 2016; Slothuus & de Vreese 2010) or difficult the political issue is (Pannico 2017), and on the level of elite polarization on the issue (Bolsen et al. 2014; Druckman et al. 2013; Levendusky 2010; Slothuus and de Vreese 2010). This contingency creates a problem of external validity common to experimental research: Not all versions of a treatment are equally informative about the real-world effects of a phenomenon, but researchers seldom know which to trust more, making it impossible to draw general conclusions.

To address this problem of external validity, we present a novel experimental design testing the power of party cues embedded in real-world news. First, we randomly sample 60 news articles covering policy proposals from the Associated Press, one of the world's leading news agencies. Second, we carefully edit the articles, creating two versions of each: 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 6,000 nationally representative US participants. This experimental design allows us to estimate a party cue effect that averages across the different features of the news articles, but also to examine which features that enhance and reduce the effect.

Authors

• Rasmus Skytte, Aarhus University

• Mathias Osmundsen