Do Voters Respond to Party Manifestos or to a Wider Information Environment? An Analysis of Mass‐Elite Linkages on European Integration

James Adams, Lawrence Ezrow and Zeynep Somer‐Topcu

American Journal of Political Science, 2014, vol. 58, issue 4, 967-978

Abstract: Recent studies analyze how citizens update their perceptions of parties’ left‐right positions in response to new political information. We extend this research to consider the issue of European integration, and we report theoretical and empirical analyses that citizens do not update their perceptions of parties’ positions in response to election manifestos, but that citizens’ perceptions of parties’ positions do track political experts’ perceptions of these positions, and, moreover, that it is party supporters who disproportionately perceive their preferred party's policy shifts. Given that experts plausibly consider a wide range of information, these findings imply that citizens weigh the wider informational environment when assessing parties’ positions. We also present evidence that citizens’ perceptions of party position shifts matter, in that they drive partisan sorting in the mass public.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12115

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:amposc:v:58:y:2014:i:4:p:967-978

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().