What shapes Americans’ policy preferences: partisanship or policy content? While previous studies have addressed this question, many of them focused on high-salience policies. This raises an identification challenge because the content of such policies contains party cues. The current study employs a diverse set of low-salience policies to discern the unique effects of party cues and policy content, before the issues are “hijacked” by the parties. These policies are embedded in an original conjoint experiment administered among a national US sample. The design enables me to assess the effects of policy content and partisan sponsorship orthogonally. Contrary to previous studies, I find that respondents are attentive to policy content on low-salience issues, and it influences their policy preferences similarly or even more than party cues, across policy domains. Moreover, the support patterns and levels of Democrats and Republicans for many low-salience policies are similar. Party cues, by contrast, polarize partisans’ preferences across domains.

中文翻译：

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在党劫持之前：党的线索在评估低显着性政策中的有限作用——实验证据

是什么塑造了美国人的政策偏好：党派关系还是政策内容？虽然以前的研究已经解决了这个问题，但其中许多研究都集中在高度显着的政策上。这提出了识别挑战，因为此类政策的内容包含政党线索。当前的研究采用了一系列不同的低显着性政策，以在问题被政党“劫持”之前辨别政党暗示和政策内容的独特影响。这些政策嵌入在美国全国样本中进行的原始联合试验中。该设计使我能够正交评估政策内容和党派赞助的影响。与之前的研究相反，我发现受访者关注低显着性问题的政策内容，这对他们的政策偏好的影响与政党暗示相似，甚至更多，跨策略域。此外，民主党和共和党对许多低显着性政策的支持模式和水平是相似的。相比之下，党派线索使党派人士的偏好在各个领域两极分化。