Mobilizing Citizens for Costly Policies: The Conditional Effect of Party Cues on Support for International Bailouts in the European Union
研究发现公民对欧盟国际救助的态度受政党线索影响，而非仅基于意识形态；实验表明政党线索能在精英分歧时动员支持，但无党派认同和低政治素养者不受精英共识影响。
Abstract Previous research finds citizens' attitudes towards international redistribution in the European sovereign debt crisis to be related to party preferences. This article further reveals the nature of this link. We show that citizens follow party cues on international bailouts, rather than having merely ideologically congruent positions. By employing an original survey experiment that exposes respondents to elite cues, we additionally uncover underlying dynamics. First, party cues mobilize support for bailouts even in the face of salient elite dissent and, second, even a strong elite consensus does not affect citizens without PID and low levels of political sophistication. The findings of the experiment are cross‐validated with data from the voter survey of European Election Study 2014. The results suggest that current debates about international bailout packages deepen a polarization between politicized and non‐politicized Europeans.