Estimating the between-issue variation in party elite cue effects

Influential models and studies of public opinion formation identify party elite cues as prominent drivers of public policy opinion. However, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, and this variation is a barrier to the generalizability, theoretical development and practical utility of party elite cues research. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues studied. I analyze three datasets from party elite cue experiments that contain between 10 and 34 U.S. policy issues each. I estimate the variance across the unobserved population of policy issues in both (i) the basic party elite cue effect and (ii) its relationship with the putative moderators of political sophistication and need for cognition. My estimates of between-issue variation in the basic and moderator effects equate to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the between-study variation previously observed in the literature. This highlights that a majority of existing between-study variation in party elite cue effects could simply be caused by the studies’ limited sampling of policy issues. I conclude that sampling a larger number of policy issues would substantially improve the generalizability of studies’ estimates of party elite cue effects, thereby providing a firmer empirical foundation for theory building, testing, and for applying the results to predict future cases of party elite influence.

Too Pacifist in Peace, Too Bellicose in War: Political Information and Foreign Policy Opinion

Scholars of public opinion and foreign policy recognize that the general public is poorly informed about international affairs, but they disagree about whether and how this fact affects the policies that it will support. Some argue that the lack of information has little effect, at least in the aggregate, while others hold that political information mediates attention to elite cues. We investigate a third line of argument in which political information has a direct effect on the policy options individuals support. Low levels of political information give rise to a pattern of complacency toward likely international threats in times of relative peace and a contrasting tendency to support violent and aggressive policy options during war or acute crises. We test this argument using survey data from two relevant historical settings: the American entry into World War II and the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

From Wedge Issue to Partisan Divide: The Development of Immigration Policy Opinion after 2016

President Trump won an Electoral College majority in 2016 bolstered by voters who supported him, but not the previous nominee, Mitt Romney. Evidence suggests that a campaign promising a more restrictive immigration policy was the key to this improved performance among cross-pressured voters. In the months since inauguration day 2017, however, voters did not remain unaware of the administration’s programmatic steps on immigration and the opposition they encountered. I interpret evidence from a panel survey to suggest that voters gained knowledge about immigration policy after 2016, and began to align their policy views with the positions of their favored political parties. Inasmuch as voters’ policy positions become identical with their party preference, the potential for immigration policy to again act as a wedge issue in 2020 is greatly reduced. President Trump’s 2020 campaign may be able to mobilize more base voters given this increase in policy-party congruence but he may not be as successful as in 2016 in attracting crossover voters.

Populism, Foreign Policy, and the GOP

This chapter investigates the state of foreign policy opinion within the Republican Party today. Perhaps surprisingly, the basic distribution of voter opinion on foreign policy within the GOP has not changed that much since the early Obama era. However, Republican voters do support Trump, and not only because he is an incumbent president from the same party. The GOP has moved in a populist, culturally conservative, and white working-class direction over a period now spanning several decades. In this sense, Trump is as much an effect as a cause. He has broken open prior conservative orthodoxies. In certain ways, on a range of specific issues following his presidency, this leaves the future of Republican foreign policy wide open. But observers should understand that the conservative-leaning American nationalism he has championed is not about to disappear when he leaves the scene. In one form or another, it is here to stay.