Party Cues or Lived Realities? Contextual Constraint and Budgetary Preference Formation

Citizens’ policy preferences are often assumed to follow partisan cues, yet everyday material conditions may anchor these preferences in ways that resist party influence. This raises a central puzzle: when partisan signals conflict with lived local realities, which ultimately shapes citizens’ distributive choices? While existing research shows that party cues can strongly structure attitudes, we know far less about whether such effects hold for concrete budgetary decisions and whether they override place-based needs. We address this puzzle through a randomised experiment embedded in the Voting Advice Application Choose4Cyprus 2026. Users are asked to allocate a hypothetical state budget across key policy areas. A control group receives no priming, while the treatment groups are exposed to either information on the actual state budget or party-specific budgetary allocations. This design allows us to test whether budgetary preferences reflect partisan alignment or the socio-spatial context of residence. The study focuses on differences between urban and rural residents in their budgetary priorities and on whether locality-based preferences persist or are attenuated when party cues are introduced, using users’ reported vote intentions.