Abstract
This chapter extends and tests the generalizability of party labels as information shortcuts to help assess and make decisions about political candidates. We argue that the utility of party labels as information shortcuts depends upon the quality of the party label cues, as well as an individual’s level of political sophistication. Data from a national internet-based experiment in the multi-party setting of Canada allow us to test how well party cues aid with assessments of candidates’ issue stances and voting correctly in a context with less ideologically coherent parties compared to the U.S., where the majority of scholarship has focused. We find evidence that high sophisticates make better use of party labels as information shortcuts when candidates take stances consistent with the party label, and party labels from more ideologically cohesive parties are relied upon to a greater extent than cues from less cohesive parties.
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Notes
- 1.
Political sophistication is far from a straight-forward term (see Luskin 1987), yet we use it here to capture the general construct that is operationalized in several different ways in the scholarship we reference; when it comes to our own empirical analyses, we select to operationalize the concept using a political information module.
- 2.
While the focus of this chapter is on the use of party labels in such systems, we recognize that voters may use other cues (such as leader evaluations or economic perceptions, among other things) as well.
- 3.
This expectation also fits well with Lau et al.’s (2014) argument and finding that the “ideological distinctiveness” of the parties within a system (measured in their study by a party polarization index) increases citizens’ abilities to cast a correct vote.
- 4.
Scholarship shows that many people hold onto misinformed beliefs confidently, even when provided with corrective information (Kuklinski et al. 2000; Nyhan and Reifler 2008). This tendency may, in fact, be highest among those who are more sophisticated; for example, Charles and Milton (2006) show that those who are more sophisticated are more likely to counter-argue information that runs against their predispositions.
- 5.
The Bloc Québécois (BQ) is a regional party which competes only in Quebec. The Green Party of Canada received less than 4 % of the popular vote, and only 1 seat, in the 2011 election.
- 6.
Data accessed from https://www.poltext.org/en/part-2-position-political-actors/expert-survey-method.
- 7.
In Canada, as elsewhere, political parties compete on various dimensions, including valence, candidate traits and issue positions. Our focus here is on the degree to which party cues have utility with respect to issue-based evaluations and choice in the Canadian case.
- 8.
For more information on SSI, see http://www.surveysampling.com/solutions_country.php?ID=4.
- 9.
Focusing on Canada outside of Quebec is a common practice in studies of Canadian political behavior (see, for example, Gidengil et al. 2006).
- 10.
Confirming representativeness by comparing our survey to the 2006 census is difficult given the differences in target populations and measures. However, our sample has similar characteristics to other samples of the population, such as the 2006 Canadian Election Study (although our sample is somewhat better educated).
- 11.
A riding is an electoral district.
- 12.
Post-study diagnostics were conducted to assess whether random assignment resulted in an even distribution of subjects into the four conditions across a variety of measures (age, female, income, married, party identification, ideology, political information, full-time employment, and education). A series of oneway ANOVA analyses revealed very good balance overall; significant differences (p < 0.10, two-tailed, a generous test of significance) were detected only for income, age, and education. We report on robustness checks related to these differences in later footnotes.
- 13.
Note that our expectations and analyses are focused on comparisons across conditions; an untreated control group is not appropriate in a hypothetical election design since individuals need to be provided with some information about the candidates in order to make evaluations.
- 14.
While party discipline is strong in Canada, there are instances when a politician has held stances inconsistent with those of his/her party, such as described in Condition 4. For example, the same-sex marriage issue encouraged several politicians to break party ranks, one to the point of resigning his Cabinet position (Liberal Joe Comuzzi).
- 15.
We acknowledge that as our study took place outside of an election period the potential for general low awareness and misinformation about party positions exists. This may impact the degree to which inconsistent information was recognized, but there is no reason to expect that the parties would be differentially affected. We are also unable to account for differences in the salience of issues across individuals, which may lead to more or less awareness of the correctness of specific issue stances. Future research should investigate these potential sources of variability in party cue effects.
- 16.
Considering just the experts’ placements on the left-right scale, the mean value for the NDP is 4.9; for the Liberal Party it is 11.1; for the Progressive Conservative Party it is 13.6; and for the Canadian Alliance it is 17.5.
- 17.
The content analysis was performed by a research assistant blind to the project’s objectives.
- 18.
We supplemented these analyses with multiple regression analyses with controls for age, income and education, measures that were unevenly distributed across conditions (see footnote 12). In the few cases where the regression results are different, we report these in footnotes and the results are available in the appendix.
- 19.
Space limitations on the survey prevented us from being able to ask respondents to place each candidate on the five issues, so we focus on the candidate each individual preferred.
- 20.
Along these same lines, we also compare the Party Only condition to the Consistent condition.
- 21.
Two-tailed p-values from the ANOVA tests are as follows: low sophistication, prefer Liberal, p ≤ 0.000; low sophistication, prefer Conservative, p ≤ 0.002; low sophistication, prefer NDP, p ≤ 0.000. For high sophisticates the p-values are: prefer Liberal, p ≤ 0.000; prefer Conservative, p ≤ 0.000; prefer NDP, p ≤ 0.016. If we look at pair-wise comparisons between conditions using Tukey tests, we always observe significant differences between Party Only and Issues Only, and Party Only and Consistent. However, there are no significant differences between Issues Only and Consistent, which makes sense in that individuals are paying attention to the issue information in both conditions. These results are robust to multiple regression analyses (see Appendix Tables 1 and 2). There is only one case where the regression results deviate from the difference in means tests and that is low sophistication Conservatives getting fewer correct placements in the Consistent condition compared to Issues Only. One possibility for this difference may be that low sophisticates did not think the party would take a particular stance, leading to lower recall. This may be related to the level of awareness of the party’s stances in a non-election period.
- 22.
As a robustness check and, specifically, to consider whether judging “correctness” by the stylized policy statements we assigned to candidates is biasing these results, we also analyzed the data with an alternative “correct” coding that reflects different but reasonable interpretations of the parties’ stances. If we adjust the assumptions of party platforms in the Party Only condition, such that Liberals want to increase commitments in Afghanistan, Conservatives want to decrease commitments, and the NDP oppose increasing taxes, then we still observe significant ANOVAs for low sophisticates for all three parties and for high sophisticate Liberal and Conservative supporters. The only deviation is that the ANOVA among high sophisticate NDP supporters is no longer significant (p = 0.61), which suggests that the party cue is a substitute for the issue stance information. This is consistent with our expectation that the NDP cue should be more effective than the others, particularly among high sophisticates. The mean number correct in the Party Only condition is 3.76 when we make this change.
- 23.
If we again adjust the assumptions of party platforms in the Party Only condition, we find that low sophisticate Liberal supporters (mean = 2.18) and NDP supporters (mean = 2.32) do better than guessing (p = 0.06 and p = 0.02, respectively), while the remaining results remain consistent with those reported in the main text. If we look separately at each issue, low sophisticates do not do better than guessing on any issue, while high sophisticate Liberal supporters do better on childcare and same sex marriage, high sophisticate Conservative supporters do better on Afghanistan, and high sophisticate NDP supporters do better on welfare, child care, and Afghanistan.
- 24.
It may also be relevant that the NDP has never held government, which may allow it to maintain ideological cohesion to a greater degree (see Brader et al. 2013).
- 25.
If we look at the issues we manipulated to be inconsistent separately, this is the case for Afghanistan but not same-sex marriage for Liberal supporters and taxes but not same-sex marriage for NDP supporters. That participants were more likely to pay attention to stances on same-sex marriage may indicate that it was a more salient issue.
- 26.
We speculate that there is a disconnect between what voters thought of the party and the party’s actual stances, which is plausible given the newness of the party at the time of the study. It is also possible that public awareness of issue positions was low when our study was conducted (outside of an election period). When we look at the manipulated stances, those who prefer the Conservative Party are less likely to correctly identify the candidate’s stance on Afghanistan in the Inconsistent condition compared to the Consistent condition, but there are no differences for same-sex marriage.
- 27.
In multiple regression analyses, there is a significant difference between the two conditions among high sophisticate Conservatives (p ≤ 0.09), but they are more likely to make correct assessments in the Inconsistent condition (see Appendix Tables 1 and 2). This is consistent with the finding for low sophisticates. Given the direction of the difference, this finding provides no support for the use of the Conservative cue as a shortcut. If we look only at the manipulated issues, we find the same pattern to that reported in the main text.
- 28.
Voters may use other criteria to evaluate candidates in real elections, but subjects were not provided with that information in our study in order to isolate the influence of party cues.
- 29.
If we divide the analysis by vote choice for each party, then our dependent variable would capture whether individuals who voted for a given party voted correctly or not for that party, not whether individuals should have voted for that party and did not.
- 30.
One other potential limitation of this measure is that it does not include some affective value for remaining loyal to one’s party in the calculation of a correct vote.
- 31.
In the regression analysis (see Appendix Table 3), the Party and Issues conditions become statistically indistinguishable among high sophisticates. Therefore, once we control for the imbalance on age, income, and education across experimental conditions, the party cue does work as a substitute. This is even stronger evidence of the differences due to sophistication.
- 32.
The results across all of these analyses are consistent if we change our assumptions about the Liberal and Conservative stances on Afghanistan and the NDP stance on taxes in the Party Only condition.
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Merolla, J.L., Stephenson, L.B., Zechmeister, E.J. (2016). Deciding Correctly: Variance in the Effective Use of Party Cues. In: Blais, A., Laslier, JF., Van der Straeten, K. (eds) Voting Experiments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40573-5_2
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