For those without a clue. Party cues versus leader cues in a partitocratic system under pressure.

One of the traditional functions of political parties is to bring structure in the political debate, and in electoral contexts in particular (Katz, 2014). Parties help citizens to make informed political decisions without needing extensive knowledge of politics. Some citizens undertake themselves considerable cognitive efforts to form an opinion about political issues and candidates for elected office, while other citizens refrain from these demanding efforts and use shortcuts. This latter group of citzens rely on heuristic processing that could involve different kinds of cues, of which party cues are the most well-known (Leeper & Slothuus, 2014). Citizens using party cues rely on the party label both for determing their evaluation (where a candidate stands for, or where on the political spectrum a statement can be positioned) and their appreciation (whether or not they like the candidate or agree with the statement). The central role of parties has, however, recently been challenged by a number of trends including ideological convergence (Adams & Somer-Topcu, 2009), partisan dealignment (Garzia et al, 2020) and increasing personalization (Rahat & Helboe-Pedersen, 2021). As Azrout & de Vreese (2018) has demonstrated that citizens’ use of party cues depends on the strength of party identification they have, we could reasonably expect that the above-mentioned trends have an impact on the general use of party cues. Therefore, in this paper we explore the current relevance of party cues, and compare their effects with those of leader cues, which should have gained prominence according to the personalisation literature. We present the results of three orginal survey experiments conducted in Flanders (Belgium), which constitutes a textbook example of a partitocracy, i.e. a political system in which political parties play a dominant role, which could foster the use of party cues. At the same time, parties’ connections to society are waning as evidenced e.g. by declining membership figures (van Haute & Wauters, 2019). While existing literature has mostly focused on the two-party presidential system of the US, Belgium constitutes a multiparty parliamentary system, which could blur party cues due to a larger number of parties and the necessity to form coalition governments. In the three experiments we offer respondents a political statement about a policy issue, for which we manipulate the messenger (either a party, a party leader or no messenger at all). We analyse whether the kind of messenger that is offered has an impact on 1) how respondents position this statement on a left-right scale (evaluation), and on 2) respondents’ level of agreement with that statement (appreciation). This allows us to assess the current relevance of party cues, both as such and in comparison with leader cues. By focusing on one of the core functions of parties (structuring the political debate), we contribute to the broader question of the relevance of the party paradigm.