Do Quebeckers Follow the Leader?

Are politicians shaping their message to match citizens’ preferences or are citizens adjusting their issue positions to reflect their partisan preferences? According to Lenz (2012), citizens "follow the leader" by adapting their views on policies according to their partisan preferences. Our paper tests Lenz's theory in the Canadian context. More specifically, we use the 2012 and 2014 Quebec panel component of Vote Compass data (n > 50,000) to see whether Lenz's theory holds in an electoral context experiencing heated identity issue debates. Our results suggest that the theory is right: partisan preferences affect citizen’s policy stands. However, we show that citizen's persuasiveness can also depend on how important specific issues are for citizens personally. This last finding is in accordance with an influential literature (see Krosnick 1990) that shows that issue voting occurs among specific segments of the electorates to which parties try to appeal by changing their policy stands.