What’s in a Cue? A Reputational Model of Party Cue Effects on Public Opinion

• In Event: Partisan Cues

Abstract

The potential power of partisan elites to influence public opinion is an important topic in political science, with major implications for democratic representation and responsiveness. A common finding is that citizens are more inclined to support a policy if it is endorsed by their party. However, less is known about why and through what mechanisms party cues influence opinion formation. Existing literature suggests that citizens follow their party either blindly without thinking much about policy content or by engaging in motivated reasoning where they actively defend the policy position of their party. By this view, a party cue merely signals group allegiance. In this paper, we propose an alternative, “reputational” model of how citizens may respond to party cues. We argue that because political parties have reputations (i.e., citizens have pre-existing knowledge about what the parties stand for and who they represent), citizens can use party cues to make inferences about policy proposals endorsed by political parties. Our main hypothesis is that citizens – given they are knowledgeable about party reputations – can use party cues to make inferences about the content, attributes, beneficiaries, and consequences of a policy. We test our reputational model in several experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark across a variety of policy issues. We analyze both closed-ended survey questions as well as rich text materials from open-ended responses. We find that in response to party cues on policy issues, people infer diagnostic information about the specific content and consequences of a given policy. This supports our conjecture that people draw relevant inferences about policy content based on the party cue and that people can draw these inferences from party cues alone. Sometimes people might follow their party blindly, but our study shows that when a party supports a policy, this cue – in and of itself – contains a wealth of policy-relevant information. In such instances, cue-taking might not be so blind after all.

Authors

• Martin Bisgaard, Aarhus University

• Rune Slothuus, Aarhus University