11:00 - 13:15
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Maurits Meijers
Discussant/s:
Rune Slothuus
Meeting Room A

Clareta Treger
Partisan Cues Dominate Ideological Preferences in Policy Appraisal. Experimental Evidence

Renu Singh
Partisanship, Elite Cues, and Support for Public Health Policies in Germany and the United States

Rune Slothuus, Rasmus Skytte, Martin Bisgaard
What's in a Cue? How Citizens Infer Policy Information from Party Cues

Björn Bremer, Maurits Meijers, Theresa Kuhn, Francesco Nicoli
Party Cues and Support for Common European Debt: Experimental Evidence of In- and Out-Party Cues in Five Countries

Markus Wagner, Thomas Meyer
How do voters form perceptions of party positions?
Partisan Cues Dominate Ideological Preferences in Policy Appraisal. Experimental Evidence
Clareta Treger
Tel Aviv University

A lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to political polarization in the American public. One account describes the cleavage as ideological, namely revolving around divergent policy preferences of different partisans. A different explanation holds that party labels are strong heuristics that voters use to adjust their policy preferences to their party. As there is usually a reasonable fit between the partisanship of the policy promoter and the policy goal, it is difficult to discern which is a stronger driver of policy evaluation and opinion formation: partisan cues or ideological preferences? Using an original experiment that includes both policy content and partisan sponsorship as distinct and orthogonal attributes of policy proposals, I test the extent to which Democrats and Republicans are driven by policy preferences and partisan cues. I find that across an array of domains, the content of the policy has virtually no effect on the preferences of different partisans. This holds even on issues pertaining to key ideological divides such as taxation. Instead, I find that partisan cues have major effects on respondents' views on a given policy. The one exception are policies dealing with moral issues – e.g. euthanasia and pornography consumption – which seem to be driven by both policy considerations and partisan cues. Overall, these findings suggest that polarization on policy issues is also an outcome, and not just a cause, of partisanship in the US public sphere.