When can a party credibly change its policy on an issue? Nothing forces parties to keep their promises after being elected. Voters may thus view platform shifts as mere pandering, discounting its credibility. We propose that voters use the direction of a platform shift as a signal of the party’s motivation and policy commitment. Shifting to an unpopular policy position is a costly signal of principled motives, while a shift to a popular position suggests opportunistic motives. Two survey experiments, one using hypothetical parties and another using a real case of mainstream party accommodation of the radical right, show that voters infer party motivations and commitment from platform shifts in line with the predictions of our argument. This study provides an explanation for the persistence of the radical right, the stability of issue ownership, and why platforms often fail to affect perceptions of party positions.

Rational voters care about outcomes, while parties campaign on policy proposals whose outcomes are never perfectly known. Can parties exploit this uncertainty to shape public opinion? I present a spatial preference model for policy proposals with uncertain outcomes. Empirically, I conduct a large pre-registered survey experiment where I present respondents with predictions about the effects of three policy proposals. The findings show that respondents update their attitudes to the proposals as their beliefs about outcomes change and that partisan senders are no less able to influence beliefs than non-partisan experts. Contrary to previous research, respondents discount outcome uncertainty by giving equal weight to conflicting optimistic and pessimistic predictions. The study shows that parties can shape public opinion by influencing voter beliefs and that voters are not repelled by the uncertainty inherent in conflicting information.

Political actors face a tradeoff when they try to influence the beliefs of voters about the effects of policy proposals. They want to sway voters maximally, yet voters may discount predictions that are inconsistent with what they already hold to be true. Should political actors moderate or exaggerate their predictions to maximize persuasion? I extend the Bayesian learning model to account for confirmation bias and show that only under strong confirmation bias are predictions far from the priors of voters self-defeating. I use a pre-registered survey experiment to determine whether and how voters discount predictions conditional on the distance between their prior beliefs and the predictions. I find that voters assess predictions far from their prior beliefs as less credible and, consequently, update less. The paper has important implications for strategic communication by showing theoretically and empirically that the prior beliefs of voters constrain political actors.

While there is broad agreement that citizens’ policy opinions are unstable, there is longstanding disagreement about what this instability means. Some scholars interpret the instability as measurement error, while others attribute it to the conflicted and uncertain nature of citizens’ attitudes. To distinguish these perspectives, we join them in a common theoretical framework, and derive rival empirical implications for temporal instability and persuasion. To test the predictions, we introduce a survey measure that allows respondents to express uncertainty directly. Across two three-wave panel studies and a persuasion experiment, we find that uncertain attitudes are less stable and more susceptible to persuasion, even when accounting for measurement error. Moreover, expressed uncertainty predicts the direction and pattern of future attitude change, indicating that respondents possess meaningful awareness of their uncertainty. These findings show that instability cannot be reduced to measurement error alone, with important implications for democratic accountability.

Understanding policy issues is fundamental for citizens’ democratic participation, yet most citizens lack detailed knowledge about even the most prominent policy proposals. We argue that citizens use parties’ policy reputations to infer the content and consequences of policies. We test our theory in a particularly demanding context: during the government negotiations following the Danish national election in November 2022. Two preregistered experiments examine how citizens infer the substance of two real and salient policy proposals from the election campaign, varying which single parties or potential government coalitions sponsored the proposals. The results show that citizens make different inferences about the policies based on which party or government coalition is proposing them, reflecting the parties’ policy reputations. A second study, a survey among top political journalists from the main news media outlets, validates the accuracy of citizens’ policy inferences. Overall, our paper contributes to the literature on party cues by showing that citizens are able to draw on multiple party cues in forming nuanced and accurate beliefs about the effects of policies. These results support our argument that parties help citizens grasp the meaning of policy issues.

Party cues—signaling what positions political parties take on policy issues—are a strong influence on public opinion. But do party cues help citizens form opinions consistent with their principles, or do they lead citizens astray? We exploit a rare opportunity—an unexpected national referendum combined with a multi-wave panel survey—to study party influence across two counter-factual settings: initially, a context without party signals and, later, a context where parties took center stage. Party cues led citizens to, overall, form opinions consistent with their principles and not going against them. These opinion dynamics occurred because most citizens were already sorted with their party on principles, meaning they could toe the party line and still form an opinion in line with their principles. Whether parties help or harm opinion formation depends not only on citizens’ willingness to take cues from their party, but on what positions parties lead them to.

When deciding whether to support a policy, citizens often rely on heuristics such as party cues, whether their party supports or opposes a policy proposal. While some argue this simplifies decision-making, critics warn it may mislead citizens when parties deviate from their typical policies. This study examines how the party system mitigates this risk. We propose that cues from other parties serve as “fire alarms” for partisans, alerting them to deviations from their party’s typical policies. Through 24 preregistered experiments involving partisans from all parties in the Danish parliament across three central issues, the study finds that the structure of party conflict shapes partisans’ understanding and support for a policy from their party. Importantly, when policy proposals from partisans’ own parties are opposed by parties with similar policy reputations to their own party and supported by parties with dissimilar policy reputations, partisans infer that the policy is atypical for their party and decrease their support. This shows how political institutions influence citizens’ decision-making processes.

We examine whether social identity ties facilitate the spread of violent conflict. To do so, we assess whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes hate crimes towards Jews and Muslims in the United States using daily data from 2000 to 2016. We measure the timing and intensity, and determine the instigators in the conflict using the number of conflict fatalities and US mass media coverage of the conflict. Analyses using both conflict measures find that conflict events trigger hate crimes in the coming days following a retaliatory pattern: anti-Jewish hate crimes increase after Israeli attacks and anti-Islamic hate crimes increase after Palestinian attacks. There is little evidence that the ethno-religious group not associated with the attacker is subjected to hate crimes during this period. Moreover, the lack of an effect of nonviolent conflict reporting suggests that hate crimes are not triggered by the salience of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in itself. Our findings show that victimization transcends the locality of the conflict, implying that violent conflict may be more costly than existing research suggests.