Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death near the end of the Trump presidency set off a fight in which Republicans moved to rapidly replace her over Democrats’ objections. I use a survey that was in the field at the time to assess whether this period affected the Court’s legitimacy. I find that Democrats who responded in the days just after Justice Ginsburg’s death saw the Court as less legitimate than those who responded shortly before it. These findings connect to broader questions about the sources of Court legitimacy, the mechanisms through which it changes, and the impact of contestation over appointments.

Political parties and civic organizations disseminate information to improve citizen decision making in local elections. Do citizens choose to consume such information and, if so, how does it affect their decisions? We conduct a survey experiment during a real-world local election that randomly assigns 1) political party endorsements, 2) a voter guide, 3) no information, or 4) a choice among these options. Respondents assigned to receive party endorsements and a voter guide are more likely than respondents receiving no information to choose candidates who share their policy views. When given a choice, a majority opts to receive information (including many with low levels of political interest), with most respondents preferring a voter guide. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that the effect of information on those who choose to receive it is substantial. These results offer hope that voter education efforts can succeed despite widespread political disinterest.

Political economy theories tell us that policy preferences are driven by economic self-interest and that party cues can be a rational decision-making strategy. But does citizens’ ability to assess their self-interest influence the sources of information they rely on and their policy choices? I hypothesise that financial and economic literacy influences the type of information individuals are responsive to, and ultimately, their economic policy preferences. Using a survey experiment on price controls in Italy, I manipulate whether citizens receive party cues or policy information. I show that financially and economically literate individuals are more likely to understand information concerning the costs and benefits of the policy under analysis, and to be responsive to it. This is not the case for financially and economically illiterate individuals, who are more receptive to party cues, even when such cues are misleading and lead them to support welfare-reducing policies.

Perhaps hundreds of survey experiments have shown that political party cues influence people’s policy opinions. However, we know little about the persistence of this influence: is it a transient priming effect, dissipating moments after the survey is over, or does influence persist for longer, indicating learning? We report the results of a panel survey experiment in which US adults were randomly exposed to party cues on five contemporary US policy issues in an initial survey and gave their opinions. A follow-up survey 3 days later polled their opinions again. We find that the influence of the party cues persists at ∼50% its original magnitude at follow-up. Notably, our design rules out that people simply remembered how they previously answered. Our findings have implications for understanding the scope and mechanism of party cue influence as it occurs in the real world and provide a benchmark for future research on this topic.

Partisan and affective polarization should have observable consequences in Canada, such as bias in political information search and processing. This article presents the results of three studies that test for partisan and ideological bias using the Digital Democracy Project's study of the 2019 Canadian election. Study 1 uses a conjoint experiment where respondents choose from pairs of hypothetical news stories where the slant of the source and headline are both randomized. Study 2 tests for partisan-motivated responsiveness to elite cues with a policy vignette that manipulates the presence of party elite cues and a motivational prime. Study 3 requires respondents to solve a randomly assigned numeracy task that is either political or nonpolitical in nature. Results suggest that Canadians (1) select politically congenial information, though not sources of such information, (2) follow elite cues when partisan motivation is primed and (3) evaluate evidence in ways that are biased by their ideological beliefs.

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.

Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. This article argues that out-group cues from Democratic elites caused a backlash that resulted in greater climate skepticism. The authors construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at the quarterly level from 2001 to 2014 and at the annual level from 1986 to 2014. They also build time-series measures of possible contributors to climate skepticism using an automated media content analysis. The analyses provide evidence that cues from party elites – especially from Democrats – are associated with aggregate dynamics in climate change skepticism, including among supporters of the Republican Party. The study also involves a party cue survey experiment administered to a sample of 3,000 Americans through Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide more evidence of causality. Together, these results highlight the importance of out-group cue taking and suggest that climate change skepticism should be examined through the lens of elite-led opinion formation.

Motivated by a previous finding that single-party cues have no effect in Japan and by the increasing ‘presidentialization’ of Japanese politics, the present study examined whether the use of prime minister cues in place of single-party cues helps Japanese voters form policy preferences. In addition, to probe the effect of party cues that are unique to multiparty systems, the effect of multiple-party cues, which indicate that a policy is supported by multiple rather than single ideologically distinct parties, was investigated. The results of a survey experiment showed that while prime minister cues are not utilized by the supporters of incumbent parties, the supporters of opposition parties demonstrated significantly reduced approval of a policy when there was an indication that the prime minister supported it. The effect of prime minister cues on opposition supporters was stronger than that of Liberal Democratic Party cues, suggesting that leader cues are effective in Japan. Furthermore, a cue indicating that ideologically distinct parties support a policy enhances approval for that policy among the public, which suggests that multiple-party rather than single-party cues are informative in multiparty systems. Theoretical implications are discussed.