One of the requirements which the representational party model proposes is that parties have to present clear and distinct policy programs. With parties offering clear policy programs, citizens will be more informed about what parties stand for, they will be able to compare the pros and cons of the party offers, and they will also be more able to vote for the party with the most similar policy preferences. Scholars have long focuses on individual-level factors in order to explain citizens’ political knowledge. In general, it has been argued that whenever citizens are interested in politics and intelligent enough they will be able to know what parties stand for. Recently, scholars have also started to focus on the supply side, by trying to measure the clarity of parties’ policy preferences. Here, the argument is mainly that whenever parties convey precise and consistent policy statements, people will know better what parties stand for. What both literature neglects is the importance of emotions in political communication. People with strong ideological beliefs and strong attitudes towards parties will tend to search for and accept only confirming political evidence and ignore incongruent political information. Moreover, parties do not only convey policy information but also emotions. Emotional parties, parties which tend to be either liked or disliked, will hence most probably be misperceived. In my paper, I would like to argue that emotionality has a stronger impact on the accuracy with which people perceive party positions than other facilitative factors, such as party (system) institutionalization or party system fragmentation, at the party level, and political interest and education, at the individual-level.
