Party elite cues are among the most well-established influences on citizens’ political opinions. Yet, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, constraining the generalizability and theoretical development of party elite cues research. Understanding the causes of variation in party elite cue effects is thus a priority for advancing the field. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues being examined, through a reanalysis of data from existing research combined with an original survey experiment comprising 34 contemporary American policy issues. My estimate of the between-issue variation in effects is substantively large, plausibly equal to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds the size of the between-study variation observed in the existing literature. This result has important implications for our understanding of party elite influence on public opinion and for the methodological practices of party elite cues research.

中文翻译：

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估计党内精英提示效应的问题间差异

党内精英线索是对公民政治观点影响最深远的因素之一。然而，不同研究的效果大小存在很大差异，限制了政党精英线索研究的普遍性和理论发展。因此，了解政党精英线索效应变化的原因是推进该领域的优先事项。在这篇论文中，我通过对现有研究数据的重新分析，结合包含 34 个当代美国政策问题的原始调查实验，估计了党派精英线索效应的变化，这种变化仅由所研究的政策问题的异质性引起。我对问题间影响差异的估计非常大，似是而非地等于现有文献中观察到的研究间变异大小的三分之一到三分之二之间。这一结果对于我们理解政党精英对舆论的影响以及政党精英线索研究的方法论实践具有重要意义。