What’s in a Cue? How Party Cues Help Citizens Reason about Policy Content

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

Abstract

An influential concern among scholars of public opinion is that party cues – information about whether a party supports or opposes a policy – lead citizens to ignore information about the substantive content of policy issues. In this article, we provide theory and evidence on the reverse perspective: that citizens use party cues to get informed about the content and consequences of policy. We argue that when political parties have clear policy reputations – when they are known for advocating certain values and promoting specific societal groups – and citizens are aware of these reputations, citizens will use party cues to make inferences about the substantive meaning of policy. Across six experiments conducted in two different national contexts, with multiple party sponsors and on widely different policy areas, we show that party cues lead citizens to form substantively different understandings of specific policies. Our results show that parties play a more constructive and informative role in democracy than they are usually credited for in existing research. We discuss the theoretical and normative implications of our results.

Authors

• Rune Slothuus, Aarhus University

• Rasmus Skytte, Aarhus University

• Martin Bisgaard, Aarhus University