Partisan Influence in Suspicious Times

Abstract

Parties can significantly influence their supporter's policy views via endorsement cues raising worries about manipulation of mass opinion. We bring attention to a novel constraint on party influence: information implying that the party adopted its position due to the lobbying efforts of interest groups and campaign donors. Party cue taking is significantly reduced across three survey experiment when this type of information is presented alongside a party endorsement cue. This attenuation in cue taking occurred both when the party adopted a stereotypical as well as a counter-stereotypical policy position and both when ideologically aligned and non-aligned groups were the source of lobbyist influence. Moreover, partisans were less likely to follow the party line even though they still believed the party's policy arguments to be superior to opposing arguments and that the policy would yield positive outcomes. Our results suggest a novel and common limit on partisan influence. Word Count: 9846Replication: Replication files are available in the JOP Data Archive on Dataverse (http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/jop).The empirical analysis has been successfully replicated by the JOP replication analyst. Human Participants:The studies contained herein were conducted in compliance with relevant laws and conducted in line with ethical standards contained in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.