Cue-based formation of policy preferences

The traditional issue voting model is based on the premise that voters have enough knowledge to autonomously form their policy preferences (Brody and Page, Reference Brody and Page1972; Nie et al., Reference Nie, Verba and Petrocik1976), and democratic theories regard issue voting as an indispensable mechanism to keep legislators responsive to voters’ preferences (e.g., Dahl, Reference Dahl1971; Gilens, Reference Gilens and Berinsky2012). However, it is not easy for voters to collect and understand policy information in complex modern societies. Ordinary voters generally do not possess substantial political knowledge (Delli Carpini and Keeter, Reference Delli Carpini and Keeter1996) and lack constrained policy preferences (Converse, Reference Converse and Apter1964), and therefore they are seldom able to form exogenous ‘bedrock preferences’ to which political elites are supposed to respond (Druckman, Reference Druckman2014). One realistic solution to this discrepancy between the theory and reality is cognitive shortcuts. Since the 1970s, studies employing findings from cognitive psychology have consistently documented that even less knowledgeable voters can effectively form policy preferences on complex issues because peripheral cues allow them to heuristically bypass deep information processing.

Cues are the pieces of information that enable inferences without detailed knowledge and effortful cognitive processing (Eagly and Chaiken, Reference Eagly and Chaiken1993; Rucker and Petty, Reference Rucker and Petty2006). In the political context, cues take a variety of forms, such as interest groups’ endorsements and candidates’ likability, but the cues most readily available and reliable to voters are party cues (Downs, Reference Downs1957). In the US, where the majority of voters identify themselves as either Democrat or Republican, people effectively form policy preferences on complicated issues using their own party identification and party cues (Zaller, Reference Zaller1992; Green et al., Reference Green, Palmquist and Schickler2002; Cohen, Reference Cohen2003; Kam, Reference Kam2005; Bullock, Reference Bullock2011; Sniderman and Stiglitz, Reference Sniderman and Stiglitz2012). As an illustration, Kam (Reference Kam2005) tested the effect of party cues on policy preferences by manipulating a party's issue position in a newspaper article on food irradiation. The results indicated that party identifiers more strongly approved food irradiation when they read that their own party supported it, suggesting that party identifiers utilize party cues to form policy preferences that are consistent with their party's position. In sum, party cues enable voters with limited policy information to form ‘as-if rational’ policy preferences.

Moderating factors of party cueing

More recent studies have unraveled the heterogeneous effects of party cues. Among the factors that moderate the effects of party cues, issue salience and the clarity of parties’ ideological positions are the most important from a cross-national perspective.

Voters utilize party cues in order to compensate for their lack of information (Lupia and McCubbins, Reference Lupia and McCubbins1998), and therefore the effect of party cues is expected to be large when the salience of the issue is low and thus it is relatively difficult to learn about the issue (Merolla et al., Reference Merolla, Stephenson and Zechmeister2008). Using federalism as a low-salience issue and abortion as a high-salience issue, Arceneaux (Reference Arceneaux2008) experimentally tested whether voters punish candidates who defect from the issue positions of their party. The results demonstrated that voters punished the candidates by lowering their approval when the issue salience was high, but voters did not punish the candidates and simply followed the issue positions of their supported party's candidates when the issue salience was low. That is, when issue salience is high (e.g. abortion), voters do not simply rely on party cues to form policy preferences because they possess a relatively large body of knowledge as well as having entrenched opinions, whereas they rely more on party cues when the issue salience is low and thus they do not know much about that issue (e.g. federalism).

The other known moderator of party cueing is the clarity of parties’ ideological positions. The clearer the parties’ ideological positions, the more confident voters can be about what values and interests underpin the endorsement of a policy by a given party, leading to a larger effect of party cues on policy preferences (e.g. Skitka and Robideau, Reference Skitka and Robideau1997; Merolla et al., Reference Merolla, Stephenson and Zechmeister2008; Goren et al., Reference Goren, Federico and Caul Kittilson2009; Levendusky, Reference Levendusky2010; Brader et al., Reference Brader, Tucker and Duell2013). Conversely, when the ideological positions of parties are not clear and their issue positions are not distinctively differentiated in the eyes of voters, it is difficult to perceive the difference between parties even when party cues are available. In this situation, the effect of party cues would be limited.

The literature on moderating factors of party cueing indicates that the effect of party cues is expected to be larger in the US than in other political contexts because the ideological positions of the Democratic and Republican parties have been remarkably polarized since the 1970s (Abramowitz, Reference Abramowitz2010). Under a polarized two-party system, it is in many cases evident that if party D supports position X then the other party R opposes position X, whereas this is not the case in countries with less polarized and/or multiparty systems because the notion of an ‘out-group’ is not always clear. The prominent ideological polarization in the US makes party cueing even more effective, but is arguably anomalous from a global perspective. Standard classifications of party systems, such as those described by Sartori (Reference Satrori2005), argue that a two-party system presupposes a centripetal society where the ideological distance between the two parties tends to be small. That is, as predicted by the economic model of Downs (Reference Downs1957), the ideological positions of two major parties are expected to converge to that of the median voters to maximize their vote shares, resulting in less distinctive policies (Lijphart, Reference Lijphart1999). The polarized two-party system in the US does not fit this typology. Therefore, although the effect of party cueing has been consistently demonstrated in the US, we nevertheless need to be cautious in extrapolating the US-centered findings to other political contexts.

Party cueing in non-US contexts

The effect of party cues in countries other than the US has not been fully examined. Among the few studies, Merolla et al. (Reference Merolla, Stephenson and Zechmeister2008) tested the effect of party cues on policy preferences in Canada by conducting an experiment that compared the responses to a series of questions with and without party cues. The results indicated that aside from the New Democratic Party, a minor party with a distinctive ideological position, the party cues of the two major parties (i.e. the Liberal and Conservative parties) had hardly any effect on the policy preferences of each party's supporters, suggesting that party cues do not serve as effective shortcuts in forming policy preferences when major parties avoid taking ideologically distinctive positions.

The importance of parties’ ideological distinctiveness is also corroborated by Brader et al. (Reference Brader, Tucker and Duell2013). With survey experiments targeting Poland and Hungary as new democratic countries and the UK as a country with a long history of democracy, Brader et al. (Reference Brader, Tucker and Duell2013) tested the moderating roles of the longevity, incumbency, and ideological distinctiveness of parties in party cueing. The experiments demonstrated that ideological distinctiveness has the most consistent effect as a moderating factor of party cueing. The importance of parties’ ideological distinctiveness implies that the effect of party cues would be mitigated even in countries with a long history of democracy when the ideological differences of parties are not clearly perceived.

By contrast, Samuels and Zucco (Reference Samuels and Zucco2014) demonstrated that party cues in Brazil are as effective as those in the US. Based on social identity theory, Samuels and Zucco (Reference Samuels and Zucco2014) hypothesized that, when party cues are available, approval for a policy would increase when the respondent's supported party endorses it (i.e. ingroup cueing), whereas disapproval would increase when their opposing party endorses it (i.e. outgroup cueing). Supporting these hypotheses, Samuels and Zucco's (Reference Samuels and Zucco2014) experiments indicated that, even in Brazil, where more than 50% of the elected officials are independents, policy preferences consistent with the respondent's own partisanship were strengthened when party cues were available in the survey vignettes. Samuels and Zucco's (Reference Samuels and Zucco2014) findings illustrated that party cues are effective even under a multiparty system where partisanship is weak, supporting the generalizability of the US-centered findings.

To test the generalizability of party cueing, it is crucial to test it in further non-US contexts, especially when the extant knowledge has been derived in settings that favor the finding of party cue effects. Samuels and Zucco (Reference Samuels and Zucco2014) is one of the few studies to do this, but the party system in Brazil is rooted in the cleavage of economic inequality (Hunter and Power, Reference Hunter and Power2007) and therefore the ideological positions of major parties are relatively distinct (Power and Zucco, Reference Power and Zucco2009). By focusing on Japan, where the party system is unstable and people's party identifications are weak, the present study aims to test the generalizability of party cueing in a setting that is distinctively different from the US.

Ideological indistinctiveness of Japanese parties

During the Cold War, ‘the 1955 system’ shaped the ideological landscape in Japan, which was marked by competition between the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the progressive Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ). However, when these long-term rivals formed a coalition government in 1994 after a massive party realignment triggered by political reform in the early 1990s, the ideological structure of Japanese politics became blurred (Kabashima and Takenaka, Reference Kabashima and Takenaka1996). The ideological position of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which won government in 2009, was more liberal than that of the LDP, but many of the DPJ members in the Diet were originally elected from the LDP, and thus the ideological distinction between the DPJ and the LDP was much less clear than that between the LDP and the SDPJ under the 1955 system. Meanwhile, there have been constant realignments among minor parties, making the party system fluid. As a result, there is no major liberal party competing with the conservative LDP, and the ideological constellation of Japanese parties has become even more ambiguous.

In fact, Kabashima and Takenaka (Reference Kabashima and Takenaka2012) demonstrated that the correlation between the ideology of Japanese voters and that of their supported party ranks lowest among the ten countries studied, including the US and the UK. Corroborating this finding, Endo and Jou (Reference Endo and Jou2014) showed that the younger generation in Japan tends to perceive the Japanese Communist Party as ‘conservative’ and the neo-liberal Japan Restoration Party as ‘progressive’, suggesting that the traditional conservative–progressive ideological dimension is losing its meaning at least among the youth. These results attest to the ambiguity of Japanese parties’ ideological positions. In light of the moderating role of parties’ ideological distinctiveness, party cues in Japan are less likely to function as effective shortcuts in shaping policy preferences. Conversely, if party cues are effective even in Japan, then we must conclude that the generalizability of party cueing is quite high.

Press cues as substitutes for party cues

If party cueing is less likely in Japan, is there any substitute for party cues? We explore the possibility that press cues act as substitutes for party cues because the media system in Japan is more stable than the party system, and the ideological stances of major newspapers are distinctive and widely shared.

In contrast to the ambiguity of the ideological constellation of Japanese parties, the media system in Japan is stable partly because of prominent cross-ownership, whereby each TV network is associated with a national newspaper company (Akhavan-Majid, Reference Akhavan-Majid1990; Fujitake, Reference Fujitake2005). Specifically, the Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun, which boast the two largest circulations in the world, date back to the nineteenth century and have long held leading positions in the media system as the two major national newspapers in Japan.

More importantly, the liberal tone of Asahi Shimbun and conservative tone of Yomiuri Shimbun are well established and widely acknowledged by the public (Akuto, Reference Akuto, Pharr and Krauss1996). Unlike the ambiguous ideological positions of political parties, the contrasting ideological stances of the two major newspapers in Japan have continued coloring the coverage of recent issues such as security, nuclear energy, and international diplomacy in East Asia. The ideological distinctiveness and consistency of the two newspapers potentially make the press cues equivalent to party cues as heuristics for policy preference formation.

In fact, media outlets’ brand recognition and their general ideological slants have been demonstrated to be influential in the US (Baum and Gussin, Reference Baum and Gussin2008; Iyengar and Hahn, Reference Iyengar and Hahn2009; Stroud, Reference Stroud2008), where both the party system and the media system are polarized. As an illustration, Baum and Gussin (Reference Baum and Gussin2008) experimentally manipulated the apparent media source of identical news coverage of the 2004 presidential election. Their results showed that when CNN's logo was attached to the news, the participants perceived the news as more favorable to Kelly than to Bush, whereas they perceived the news as more favorable to Bush than to Kelly when the logo of FOX News was attached. They also found that this effect was stronger among those who were knowledgeable about the ideological slants of these media outlets. These findings strongly suggest that press cues function as an information shortcut and that citizens can heuristically interpret the news by utilizing their recognition of media brands and their associated ideological leanings.

Drawing on these findings, we expect that ideologically distinctive press cues in Japan work as substitutes for party cues and that the readers of each newspaper can use the cues to form policy preferences that are consistent with the ideological slant of the newspaper to which they subscribe. In particular, recent observations suggest that the editorial tone of Asahi Shimbun is becoming more liberal, while that of Yomiuri Shimbun is becoming more conservative, resulting in increasing polarization (e.g. Tokuyama, Reference Tokuyama2014). We expect that the ideological polarization of the media system in Japan would increase the effectiveness of press cues.

Analysis

Effect of party cues

First, to test the effect of party cues for the low-salience issue, we estimated an ordinary least-squares regression predicting post-treatment policy preferences on the temporary staffing services law with the treatment, the respondent's party identification, and their interaction term as independent variables (see Table A3 in the Supplementary Materials for the estimated model). Based on the estimated model, the point estimates and their 95% confidence intervals were plotted for each combination of the treatment and party identification (Figure 1). The treatment effect is presented as the difference in the point estimates between the treatment conditions and the control condition (i.e. with no party cue). Those who identified with minor parties other than the LDP and DPJ were excluded from the analysis because some minor parties are ideologically proximate to either the LDP or DPJ, and therefore merging them with independents would bias the ideological distribution of the category.

Figure 1.

Treatment effects of party cues on policy preferences with 95% CIs (low-salience issue)

On average, the LDP supporters approved the amendment of the temporary staffing services law more than the DPJ supporters did. The policy preferences of independents fell between them. It is noteworthy that these differences in policy preferences were also observed in control conditions in which no party cues were provided. The description of the pros and cons of the low-salience issue possibly provided policy information that enabled the participants to form policy preferences without relying on party cues. We return to this possibility in the discussion. The comparisons between the conditions with at least one party cue and with no party cue indicate that party cues hardly had any effect on policy preferences among the LDP supporters and independents. Although the DPJ supporters’ opposition to the amendment of the temporary staffing services law became slightly stronger when they were provided with a DPJ cue, this effect was not statistically distinguishable from the no party cue condition because the estimate was imprecise (i.e. a wide confidence interval) due to the limited number of DPJ identifiers.

Next, to test the effect of party cues for the high-salience issue, we estimated an ordinary least-squares regression predicting post-treatment policy preferences on the right to collective self-defense using the treatment, the respondent's party identification, and their interaction term as independent variables (see Table A3 in the Supplementary Materials for the estimated model). Based on the estimated model, the point estimates and their 95% confidence intervals were plotted for each combination of the treatment and party identification (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Treatment effects of party cues on policy preferences with 95% CIs (high-salience issue)

On average, the LDP supporters approved the limited use of the right to collective self-defense more than the DPJ supporters did. Again, the policy preferences of independents fell between them, but were closer to those of the DPJ supporters. As expected, party identifiers yielded statistically distinguishable policy preferences for the issue with high salience even when respondents were not provided with party cues. More importantly, the comparisons between the conditions with at least one party cue and with no party cue showed no statistically distinguishable differences in means, suggesting that respondents’ policy preferences were not influenced by party cues. That is, the effect of party cues was muted for the high-salience issue.

In summary, the effect of party cues is muted regardless of the salience of policy issues, which does not replicate the findings of Samuels and Zucco (Reference Samuels and Zucco2014), who found significant effects of party cues in Brazil. It is especially noteworthy that party cues are ineffective even for the low-salience issue.

Effect of press cues

To test the effect of press cues for the low-salience issue, we estimated an ordinary least-squares regression predicting post-treatment policy preference on the temporary staffing services law with the treatment, the respondent's regular newspaper subscription, and their interaction term as independent variables (see Table A4 in the Supplementary Materials for the estimated model). Based on the estimated model, the point estimates and their 95% confidence intervals were plotted for each combination of the treatment and newspaper subscription (Figure 3). Regarding newspaper subscription, the participants were categorized into four groups: (a) those who subscribed to both Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun (14%), (b) those who subscribed to only Yomiuri Shimbun (14%), (c) those who subscribed to only Asahi Shimbun (15%), and (d) those who did not subscribe to either Yomiuri or Asahi Shimbun (57%).Footnote ¹

Figure 3.

Treatment effects of press cues on policy preferences with 95% CIs (low-salience issue)

On average, Yomiuri subscribers approved the amendment of the temporary staffing services law more than Asahi subscribers did, which is consistent with the observation that Yomiuri Shimbun is conservative whereas Asahi Shimbun is liberal. The policy preferences of those who subscribed to neither Yomiuri nor Asahi Shimbun fell between those of Yomiuri and Asahi subscribers, and the preferences of those who subscribed to both newspapers were closer to those of Asahi subscribers. Significant differences in means between the conditions with at least one press cue and with no press cue were not found, and therefore the press cues were not effective in forming policy preferences for the low-salience issue.

Likewise, to test the effect of press cues for the high-salience issue, we estimated an ordinary least-squares regression predicting post-treatment policy preferences on the right to collective self-defense using the treatment, the respondent's regular newspaper subscription, and their interaction term as independent variables (see Table A4 in the Supplementary Materials for the estimated model). Based on the estimated model, the point estimates and their 95% confidence intervals were plotted for each combination of the treatment and newspaper subscription (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Treatment effects of press cues on policy preferences with 95% CIs (high-salience issue)

Consistent with Figure 3, Yomiuri subscribers approved the limited use of the right to collective self-defense more than Asahi subscribers did. The policy preferences of those who did not subscribe to either Yomiuri or Asahi Shimbun and those who subscribed to both newspapers fell between those of Yomiuri and Asahi subscribers. As evident in Figure 4, no statistically significant differences in means between the conditions with at least one press cue and with no press cue were observed, suggesting that press cues are ineffective in forming policy preferences for high-salience issues, as was previously suggested for low-salience issues.