The Role of Policy Partisanship and Party Cues in Voter Decision-making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question of whether party or policy matters more in vote choice is a longstanding debate in political science. Evidence on this question is mixed. We argue that the effect of a policy position on vote choice depends on the degree to which party cues are embedded in the policy, which we refer to as policy partisanship. On the one hand, some studies assert that information regarding partisan policies carries more weight in the vote decision than non-partisan policies because they tend to be more salient in the media and more important to voters. On the other hand, such information could matter less for vote choice since voters can predict the positions of parties on these policies, therefore making this information redundant, especially in the presence of explicit party cues. Moreover, the existing literature draws heavily on the American case in which many policy issues are highly partisan, and as a result, may not travel well to less polarized contexts or multiparty systems. We test the effect of policy partisanship and the moderating effect of party cues on vote choice using a conjoint survey experiment administered among a representative sample of 1500 Canadians, who chose between pairs of electoral candidates. Our study sheds new light on the ongoing debate regarding the relative importance of partisan and non-partisan issues on vote choice. Examining this question in a different context—the Canadian, less polarized, multiparty system—our results allow us to assess the conditions under which policy plays an important role in voting decisions. Our research questions are: 1. How does policy partisanship affect vote choice? 2. How do explicit party cues moderate the effect of partisan and non-partisan policies on vote choice?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".