A large body of research indicates that citizens rely on cues from political elites in making voting decisions in referendums. However, it is unclear whether citizens can use cues from political parties to understand what the policy alternatives in a referendum entail. In this study, we argue that citizens rely on party cues to make sense of policy questions, by drawing on the reputations of political parties. We test this argument in a two-wave survey experiment with a representative sample of Italian voters conducted during a campaign for a set of referendums in 2022. In the first wave of the panel, we use a set of indicators to descriptively show how Italian voters perceive parties’ reputations regarding the general domain of law and order. In the second wave, we implemented a survey experiment in which the respondents learned the position of the main parties on two contested referendums. We find that political parties influence voters’ reasoning about referendum issues, especially when parties support an issue (positive cues) instead of opposing an issue (negative cues). In particular, we find that voters’ interpretation of the goal of the referendums changes when they learn that two parties with different reputations take the same position (supporting the referendum). These findings have relevant implications for the role of political elites, showing how parties can contribute to public opinion formation beyond the well-studied mechanism of partisan loyalty.