In this session of the Hot Politics Lab, Rune Slothuus (Aarhus University) will give a talk titled “What’s in a Cue? How Citizens Use Party Cues to Learn About Policy”.
The talk will be followed by a Q&A, and everbody is welcome to join via Zoom: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/96492065253 at 3pm (CET).
Talk abstract: An enduring concern among scholars of public opinion is that cues from political parties lead citizens to ignore substantive information about policy. In this article, we provide theory and evidence on the reverse perspective: that citizens use party cues to get informed about the substance of policy [to learn about the content of policy]. We argue that when political parties have clear policy reputations – when they are known for advocating certain values and promoting specific social groups – citizens will use party cues to make inferences about the substantive meaning of policy. Across six experiments conducted in two different national contexts, with multiple party sponsors and on various policy areas, we show that party cues lead citizens to form substantively different understandings of specific policies depending on the reputation of the party sponsor. Our results imply that parties might play a more constructive and informative role in democracy than they are usually credited for in existing research.
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