@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3702},
      author = {Hertz, Zachary},
      title = {Followers or Learners? Untangling the Roles of  Partisanship and Reasoning in Public Policy Preferences},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2022-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {Do people thoughtlessly support positions taken by their  party leaders, or carefully alter their beliefs when given  reason to do so? Many studies examine the effects of cues  from party leaders on policy preferences and cast voters as  party loyalists, but rarely compare information from party  leaders to information from other political and nonpartisan  sources and thus cannot disentangle whether people  rationally update their preferences or blindly follow party  leaders. To investigate, I vary cues to identify the  comparative strength of party leader cues and test issue  importance and previous knowledge as potential moderators.  I find that when asked to support or oppose a discrete  policy, partisans respond to cues from party leaders but  not other cues. When respondents respond with a continuous  range of policy preferences, however, party leader cues are  not inherently stronger — and are sometimes weaker — than  cues from other sources. I find limited evidence to suggest  either issue importance or political knowledge  significantly moderates partisan sensitivity to elite cues,  no matter the source. These results suggest that while  party leaders draw partisans to express support for  individual policy planks, leaders’ influence on underlying  beliefs is far more complicated and voters engage in more  cognition than previously suggested.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3702},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3702},
}