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?
Partisanship, Elite Cues, and Support for Public Health Policies in Germany and the United States
Renu Singh
Georgetown University Law Center
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)

Most political issues receive little attention from the public and policymakers. How does the public come to hold their views on such low salience issues? Is public opinion responsive to cues from co-partisan political elites? Or are attitudes still structured by underlying partisan loyalties or other individual characteristics? This study addresses these questions by conducting two original, representative surveys in the United States and Germany. A series of survey experiments test the extent to which public opinion toward obesity- and tobacco-related public health policies is responsive to elite cues from Green Party-SDP coalition and CDU/CSU politicians in Germany and Democratic and Republican politicians in the United States. The experiments indicate relatively little responsiveness, and they show some indication of backlash for cues from political leaders of opposing parties. The findings contribute to understanding of popular attitudes toward obesity-related public health policies and low salience policy issues more generally.