A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty, and Public Evaluations of Members of Congress

In recent years, legislators from both parties have drawn attention for their public support or opposition to leading figures within their party, such as Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. Yet we know relatively little about the extent to which voters care about members' professed loyalty to party leaders, especially when compared to competing considerations such as members' policy positions. In two national survey experiments, we independently manipulate hypothetical Democratic and Republican legislators' ideological reputations and levels of support for a leading party figure. Through our experiments and a supplemental observational analysis, we find that partisans in the electorate do use information about support for or opposition to leading party figures as a basis for evaluating members of Congress. At the same time, the results reaffirm the importance voters attach to policy and ideological factors and suggest these considerations are not overwhelmed by partisan loyalty considerations.