What drives voters’ policy preferences? Experimental evidence on leader vs. party cueing effects in a multi-party parliamentary system

A growing literature has shown that voters not only choose parties based on issue positions, but the other way around: voters often choose issue positions based on cues offered by their preferred party or leader. However, most evidence regards the U.S. two-party, presidential system, with very few studies confronting multi-party parliamentary systems and virtually none adopting a comparative leader vs. party design, on a wide range of issue. We fill this gap by presenting experimental evidence, leveraging an original post-electoral survey experiment fielded (through CAWI to a representative sample) in the immediate aftermath of the September 2022 general election in Italy – a system has experienced unprecedented levels of electoral volatility and party system change, which makes it particularly fit to investigate the enduring role of the anchors traditionally structuring voter perception of the political world. Our design leverages a classic strategy for measuring party cueing effects, but extended with a rival test of leader cueing effects, leading to what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study consistently and extensively comparing party and leader effects across several different policy domains and items in a multi-party, parliamentary system. Also, these policy issues vary in complexity and proximity to everyday life, allowing us to verify the robustness of different types of cueing effects as well as to investigate the determinants of potential cross-issue variance. First findings indicate that voters are strongly influenced in their issue opinions by favored parties and leaders – regardless the nature of the issue; and that party leaders in general have stronger cueing effects compared to party labels. However, this general picture hides significant variation: the balance between leader effects and party effects changes significantly with respondent ideology and favorite party, as well as the moderating effect of leader sympathy. These findings hence provide an important substantive and methodological contribution to the literatures on cueing effects, leadership and the personalisation of politics, and Italian politics.