Information and Issue Constraints on Party Cues

• Author: Kevin J. Mullinix,Dennis Chong
• Date: 01 November 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18803887
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18803887

American Politics Research

2019, Vol. 47(6) 1209 –1238

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18803887

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Article

Information and Issue

Constraints on Party

Cues

Dennis Chong1 and Kevin J. Mullinix2

Abstract

Past research has found that citizens will support either side of a policy debate

if their party endorses it, regardless of the policy details. Such results cast doubt

on the electorate’s ability to direct and constrain public officials. Yet other

studies find that people give priority to policy information in their decision-

making. We hypothesize that the relative effects of party cues and policy details

depend on the degree to which people can identify the ideological direction of

a policy. Using a survey experiment, we show that for policies readily classified

as liberal or conservative, preferences are less influenced by party cues than by

policy details. Public policy information has the greatest impact on preferences

relative to party cues when the information establishes the ideological direction

of the policy by indicating the values at stake and the groups that will be helped

or hurt by the policy. Information therefore is most impactful on policies that

are ideologically ambiguous in the absence of policy details.

Keywords

information, party cues, motivated reasoning, heuristics, policy preferences

For decades, scholars have recognized that partisanship exerts considerable

influence on public opinion and voting in the American electorate. Campbell,

Converse, Miller, and Stokes (1960) assert that, “identification with a party

1University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

2University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

Corresponding Author:

Dennis Chong, University of Southern California, 3518 Trousdale Pkwy, Los Angeles, CA

90089, USA.

Email: dennis.chong@usc.edu

803887APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18803887American Politics ResearchChong and Mullinix

research-article2018

1210 American Politics Research 47(6)

raises a perceptual screen through which the individual tends to see what is

favorable to his partisan orientation” (p. 133). Following party cues can be an

efficient heuristic (Popkin, 1991), but it can also be costly if it causes people

to ignore information and support policies and candidates they would oppose

in the absence of partisanship. When partisans engage in motivated reason-

ing, they seek-out information to bolster their party’s policy positions and

argue against information that challenges their party. As a result, citizens are

less affected by the merits of policy arguments than by their partisan sources

(e.g., Bolsen, Druckman, & Cook, 2014).

Experimental studies have shown that party elites can adopt widely vary-

ing positions on political issues without risking public support. Cohen (2003)

found that people are persuaded to favor radically different social welfare

policies if they originate from their own party. Similarly, Rahn (1993) and

Riggle, Ottati, Wyer, Kuklinski, and Schwarz (1992) discovered that respon-

dents continued to support their party’s candidates even when they strayed

from the party line on core issues. Further evidence of the strength of party

cues has been documented in other policy realms (Druckman, 2001; Kam,

2005), public acceptance of Supreme Court decisions (Nicholson & Hansford,

2014), and decision-making outside of politics (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015).

Yet other research identifies instances in which people pay attention to

substantive information in making judgments. For example, individuals

blamed officials of the opposing party for problems in the wake of Hurricane

Katrina, but made less partisan attributions when informed about the offi-

cials’ job responsibilities (Malhotra & Kuo, 2008). Party cues have been

found to have little effect on attitudes toward a salient issue like abortion

(Arceneaux, 2008), and policy information appears to have larger effects than

party cues on preferences when people are given extensive descriptions of an

issue (Bullock, 2011). Furthermore, one-sided presentations of policy infor-

mation have been shown to influence people’s preferences on ballot initia-

tives beyond the effects of party (Boudreau & MacKenzie, 2014).

These conflicting findings raise the question of how much latitude parties

enjoy in the positions they take before their followers will abandon them. In

this article, we examine how variation in the issues and presentation of policy

details affects the relative impact of party cues and policy information on

preferences. First, we believe the features of issues analyzed are consequen-

tial, in particular the extent to which a policy has a recognizable ideological

structure. Some policies are more readily classified by the public as liberal or

conservative proposals because of the values they further and the groups that

benefit from them. On such issues, we expect people will rely less on party

cues and give more weight to the substance of the policy, whereas party cues

should be more influential on policies that are ideologically ambiguous.