Thinking along the party lines? Alignment of beliefs and identity among European partisans

Partisans may or may not adopt views consistent with their party ideology contingent on their personal motivations but also depending on the party at stake. Extant scholarship indicates that partisans follow cues about ideological positions provided by party elites. The ability to reach out to large numbers of partisans is conditional on the clarity of these cues. In this study, I ask: Do parties that provide more distinctive and unambiguous cues have identifiers with more aligned beliefs? Addressing this gap is an important piece to understanding partisan polarization. Although some opinion congruence is desirable and a feature of good representation, extensive ideological alignment of partisan identity and beliefs stimulates ideological disagreement and animosity between homogeneous partisan camps. To answer this question, I used the European Social Survey to model identity-belief alignment in 15 countries. The robustness of results is ensured by the innovative method of belief network comparisons. Findings largely support the elite cues mechanism. I found that the extremity of party ideological positions, unlike their programmatic nicheness, significantly impacts belief consistency within partisan camps. Additionally, parties that engage in blurring their own ideological positions diminish identity-belief alignment among their identifiers. These effects are significant for all but radical right parties, which are somewhat exceptional from this pattern, possibly due to the focus on a limited number of issues.