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Erschienen in: Political Behavior 2/2008

01.06.2008 | Original Paper

Can Partisan Cues Diminish Democratic Accountability?

verfasst von: Kevin Arceneaux

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 2/2008

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Abstract

When evaluating political candidates, citizens can draw on partisan stereotypes and use partisan cues to make inferences about the candidates’ issue positions without undertaking a costly information search. As long as candidates adopt policy positions that are congruent with partisan stereotypes, partisan cues can help citizens make an accurate voting decision with limited information. However, if candidates take counter-stereotypical positions, it is incumbent upon citizens to recognize it and adjust their evaluations accordingly. Using the dual-processing framework, I hypothesize about the conditions under which individuals reduce their reliance on partisan cues and scrutinize counter-stereotypical messages, and test these hypotheses with experimental data collected from a nationally representative sample of adults. The findings show that whether individuals punish a candidate from their party for taking a counter-stereotypical position is contingent on the salience of the issue and the political awareness of the message recipient. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and normative implications of these findings.

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1
Petty and Cacioppo (1986) call systematic processing, central processing and heuristic processing, peripheral processing. The elaboration likelihood model that they develop is similar to Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly’s framework, but differs in several key respects. Nevertheless, both theories generate the same observable implications about the effects of counter-stereotypical messages in this research setting. For the sake of expositional clarity, I use the heuristic-systematic terminology found in Chaiken et al. (1989).
 
2
An additional 142 subjects were assigned to a control group. These individuals were asked to state their preferences on the issues raised in the treatment conditions, but because they did not read any articles about the candidates, they were not asked to evaluate them. The treatments did not affect the subjects’ issue attitudes, and thus, are not discussed in this study. These results are available from the author upon request. The experiment was conducted between January 6 and 12, 2005; the completion rate was 72.4% and the AAPOR-standard response rate 3 was 41.4%. Because it was drawn from a nationally representative panel, the sample is quite diverse. (See Table A1 in the appendix for a summary of demographic characteristics.)
 
3
At the end of the study, subjects were informed that the news story was not real.
 
4
As a randomization check, a joint-test of statistical significance shows that treatment assignment does not systematically covary with subjects’ demographic and attitudinal characteristics (age, gender, education, income, ethnicity, martial status, urbanity, region, home ownership, party identification, ideology, and knowledge about politics) (χ2[189] = 184.22, p = 0.585).
 
5
Subjects who responded “don’t know” to these items were placed at the center of the scale. The results generated by this approach do not differ substantively from the alternative strategy in which these subjects are excluded from the analysis.
 
6
KN measured subjects’ educational attainment prior to the study, and so it was unnecessary to include it in the post-treatment survey. The results are not affected substantively by excluding education from the scale or randomly assigning don’t know responses to correct and incorrect responses to address the possibility that particular individuals are more likely to answer “don’t know” on knowledge questions even when they know the correct answer (cf. Mondak 2000).
 
7
I calculated the first differences and their standard errors with Monte Carlo simulations using the Clarify program for Stata (Tomz et al. 2003).
 
8
These p-values were calculated by subtracting the counter-stereotypical effect for all Democrats from the counter-stereotypical effect for liberal Democrats, estimating the standard error of the difference, and calculating the resulting t-statistic. All p-values are one-tailed.
 
9
The values reported in Figs. 1 and 2 are first differences calculated in the same fashion as the ones in Table 3, except the political awareness of the subject is taken into account. For instance, the expected counter-stereotypical effect for a Democrat in the high-salience issue condition is estimated as follows:
$$ {\rm E}(Y|RC = 0,CP = 1,D = 1,HS = 1,PA = x) - {\rm E}(Y|RC = 0,CP = 0,D = 1,HS = 1,PA = x), $$
where Y = candidate evaluation, RC = Republican candidate, CP = conservative position, D = Democratic subject, HS = high-salience issue, PA = political awareness, and x = an arbitrary value on the PA scale. These quantities and their 95% confidence intervals were estimated with the Clarify program (Tomz et al. 2003).
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Can Partisan Cues Diminish Democratic Accountability?
verfasst von
Kevin Arceneaux
Publikationsdatum
01.06.2008
Verlag
Springer US
Erschienen in
Political Behavior / Ausgabe 2/2008
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-007-9044-7

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