Political expertise, ecological rationality and party cues

Abstract Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.