Are cues from party leaders so important that they can cause individuals to change their own issue positions to align with the party's position? Recent work on the importance of party cues suggests they do, especially given the literature on partisanship as a strong and persistent group identity. However, in this paper we test the limits of those partisan cues. Using a unique two-wave panel survey design we find that the effect of party cues is moderated by the prior level of importance individuals place on an issue. We find that when a person believes an issue area to be more important, party cues are less likely to move that citizen's position, particularly when the cue goes against partisan ideological norms. Our results show evidence that an individual's own issue positions—at least the important ones—can be resilient in the face of party cues.

Luskin and Bullock’s (2011) randomized experiment on live-interview respondents found no evidence that American National Election Studies and Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences respondents hide knowledge behind the “don’t know” (DK) option. We successfully replicated their finding using two online platforms, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and Google Surveys. However, we obtained different results on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We attribute this difference to MTurkers’ experience with attention checks and other quality-control mechanisms, which condition them to avoid errors. This conditioning leads MTurkers to hide knowledge behind DK in ways not observed on other platforms. Researchers conducting political knowledge experiments or piloting surveys on MTurk should be aware of these differences.

What does the rise and election of Donald J. Trump as president mean for the future of conservatism? Republican elites continue to argue about whether Trump is changing the definition of conservatism for better or worse, although many Republicans seem content to let him shape the issues, direction, and brand of the traditional party of conservatism. We examine the ideological characteristics of different groups of Republican voters across three types of ideology: symbolic, operational, and conceptual. We find distinct differences between Republicans who consistently supported Trump and other groups that either supported him in the general election only and those who never supported him. The Never Trump camp stands out as a group that is less symbolically and operationally conservative but also better able to articulate what it means to be a conservative than do Trump’s core supporters, who look very much the opposite. These results suggest a contemporary Republican Party that is far from unified in what it means to be a conservative.

Are people conservative (liberal) because they are Republicans(Democrats)? Or is it the reverse: people are Republicans(Democrats) because they are conservatives (liberals)? Though muchhas been said about this long-standing question, it is difficult totest because the concepts are nearly impossible to disentangle inmodern America. Ideology and partisanship are highly correlated,only growing more so over time. However, the election of PresidentTrump presents a unique opportunity to disentangle party attachmentfrom ideological commitment. Using a research design that employsactual “conservative” and “liberal” policy statements from PresidentTrump, we find that low-knowledge respondents, strong Republicans,Trump-approving respondents, and self-described conservatives arethe most likely to behave like party loyalists by accepting theTrump cue—in either a liberal or conservative direction. Theseresults suggest that there are a large number of party loyalists inthe United States, that their claims to being a self-definedconservative are suspect, and that group loyalty is the strongermotivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.

This article considers the hypothesis that the positive actions taken by members of Congress (MCs) influence citizens’ evaluations of them, their party, and Congress as an institution. We begin with a look at the available cross-sectional survey data on contact with legislators and legislator and institutional approval. Their legislative responsiveness appears to have a small spillover effect on institutions. However, when we employ a unique panel design that controls for prior levels of opinion and avoids recall bias, we find no evidence of spillover effects. Overall, we find that constituents who received a response from their own MC evaluate that representative more positively than those who did not receive a response, but legislator responsiveness does not predict evaluations of the MC’s political party or the Congress.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the question of mass participation in primaries and caucuses became unusually salient, with a close Democratic race calling special attention to these often overlooked procedural elements of America's democratic system. This study adds a new element to scholarship on institutional design and citizen participation by way of a survey-based experiment conducted in the midst of the 2008 campaign. The results show that institutional choices are not neutral. Nominating candidates through caucuses rather than primaries not only reduces the number of participants, but also significantly affects the ideological composition of the electorate. Caucuses produce a more ideologically consistent electorate than do primaries, because policy centrists appear to avoid caucuses. This experimental finding is strongly buttressed by the observational data on Obama and Clinton voters.

We conducted a field experiment involving roughly 1,000 letters sent by actual individuals to nearly 500 different legislative offices in order to test whether legislative offices prioritize service over policy in their home style. We find strong evidence that both state and federal legislative offices are more responsive to service requests than they are to policy requests. This pattern is consistent with the desire of legislators to gain leeway with their constituents in order to pursue their own policy goals. We also find that at the federal level Democrats prioritize service over policy more than Republicans and at the state level legislators who won by larger margins are more likely to prioritize service over policy. Finally, our results suggest that the decision to prioritize service occurs in how the office is structured. Among other things this suggests that legislators may be microtargeting less than is often supposed.

By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movement's primary issues.