DETERMINANTS OF VARIATIONS IN THE EFFECT OF CUES ON POLITICAL ATTITUDE
Political Cues; Individual Attitudes; Elite Influence.
This dissertation investigated the influence of political cues on individual attitudes, exploring which types of questions are more susceptible to persuasion or polarization through cues provided by party elites. The hypotheses of this dissertation suggests that political questions with a low level of political sorting (H1), where members of a group face cognitive dissonance regarding the presented cue (H2), are more influenced by political elites. The research utilized a comprehensive database containing diverse questions on political issues that were subjected to different treatments of political cues, randomly distributed among participants from a representative sample of the American electorate. The results confirmed the more demanding hypothesis (H2), to the detriment of the simpler one (H1), in treatments where the cue reflected an intuitive position of the elite, but not in treatments with counterintuitive cues. The analysis highlighted the complexity of the influence of political heuristics and emphasized the importance of the content of the questions in determining the effect of the influence of party elites. The dissertation provides an empirical basis for the debate on the variation in the effect of political cues and underscores the need to consider contextual factors for possible generalizations.