Information and Issue Constraints on Party Cues

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.