Scholars have long studied the influence of parties on citizens’ policy preferences. Experiments conducted outside Canada have convincingly shown that the cues offered by political parties can influence people’s attitudes. However, the most prominent study of party cue effects in Canada finds weak effects, concluding that Canadian parties are less influential because they are less clearly ideological than parties elsewhere. We propose that parties are actually more influential than they appear because party cue effects partly depend on variables other than partisanship, notably attitudes toward the cue-giver. This is especially true in countries like Canada with multi-party systems. We show that attitudes toward parties are not clearly reflected in partisanship in Canada. We then show that more specific measures of party and leader attitudes better account for how experimental participants react to cues than does party identification alone.
