How Party Reputations Help Citizens Grasp What Is at Stake in Policy Debates

• In Event: Information and Political Knowledge

Abstract

Understanding policy issues is fundamental for citizens’ democratic participation. However, most citizens lack detailed knowledge about even the most prominent policy proposals in political debates and election campaigns. We provide a theory and empirical test of how citizens can use party cues (or party endorsements) to make sense of policy issues. We argue that citizens use parties’ policy reputations -- preexisting knowledge of what the parties generally stand for -- to infer the content and consequences of policy proposals. We test our theory in a particularly demanding context: during the government negotiations following the Danish national election in November 2022. This context featured a large number of parties, several of them new, unusually high uncertainty regarding which parties would form a government coalition, and an election campaign displaying high consensus among major parties on many policy proposals. Could citizens, even in this complex partisan context, use party cues to make sense of policy issues? We address this question in three studies. First, we conducted two experiments to examine how citizens infer the content and consequences of two real and salient policy proposals from the election campaign, while varying what single parties or potential government coalitions sponsored the proposal. The results show that citizens make significantly different inferences about the policies based on the party or government coalition proposing it, and that these inferences reflect the parties' policy reputations. In a second study, we replicated the experimental results with a two-wave panel survey during and after the government negotiations. In a third study, a survey among political journalists at the main news media, we evaluate the accuracy of citizens’ policy inferences. Overall, our paper contributes to the literature on party cues by showing that citizens are able to draw on multiple party cues in forming nuanced and accurate beliefs about the effects of policies, even in a context going beyond the traditional bloc logic of the Danish party system. These results support our argument that parties help citizens grasp the meaning of policy issues.

Authors

• Love Christensen, Aarhus University

• Rune Slothuus, Aarhus University

• Rasmus Skytte, Aarhus University