Party cues and citizens' attitudes toward the European Union: PDH Thesis in political science /
- Autores: Roberto Pannico
- Directores de la Tesis: Jordi Muñoz Mendoza (dir. tes.), Eva Anduiza Perea (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2017
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Mariano Torcal Loriente (presid.), Marta Fraile Maldonado (secret.), Alexander Kuo (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ciencia Política
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Resumen
The aim of this research is to analyse the influence that political parties have on citizens’ attitudes toward the European Union. The focus is on a cueing process: citizens perceive the European Union as a distant and complex political system and lack the relevant information for constructing autonomous opinions about the integration process; for this reason, voters use party positions as shortcuts to develop preferences about EU issues. This process makes party positions on EU issues the cause rather than the consequence of voters’ preferences.
The thesis improves the current understanding of this cueing process and focuses on three main points: (1) which voters are more likely to rely on party positions when developing attitudes toward the European Union and for which political issues their need for cues is higher; (2) which part of the messages that parties communicate shape citizens’ attitudes; (3) which party system and party characteristics make the cueing process more likely.
The first part of the thesis tests the theoretical premise of the cueing model, looking at the effects that citizens’ political knowledge and the complexity of the issue have on the effectiveness of party cues. The results from both experimental and observational data show that party influence is higher among voters that have a lower knowledge of EU politics and that even well-informed citizens need to use party cues when taking positions on particularly difficult issues. Given the high complexity of issues debated at the EU level and the low availability of information about EU politics, partisan voters appear more likely to conform to their party's positions than to question them. However, to what extent that situation represents an obstacle to political elite accountability depends on how persuasion by political parties takes place. The second part of the thesis uses experimental data to investigate whether, when exposed to a message from their party about an EU issue, partisan voters are persuaded by the argumentations that it contains or by the fact it comes from a source that they trust. If voters care more about who is taking a particular position than what is being advocated, they are likely to conform blindly to the wills of political parties, absolving politicians from accountability for their behaviour. The results of this part of the thesis show that the presence of the party label exerts a larger influence on voters’ attitudes than the content of the message; moreover, experiment participants appear willing to abandon their prior opinions in order to follow the official party line, leaving few incentives for political parties to take political positions which are consistent with their voters’ political beliefs.
Finally, the third chapter focuses on the limits of party persuasive power. It shows that when a party system is unstable, people tend to rely less on parties for political cues, given that voters need to feel some sort of familiarity with political parties to rely on their cues. This kind of experience is hard to develop when political parties are continuously changing. This chapter uses observational data from different EU countries to test the relation between party system or party instability and effectiveness of party cues. To take into account the nested nature of the data, the analysis is composed of multilevel models.
