IdeoPos

Do voters use socio-demographic cues to estimate politicians' ideological positions? 

Understanding where politicians stand for is a crucial element in a representative democracy. Inaccurate estimations of these positions can have detrimental consequences, e.g. incorrect voting, lowering political trust and exacerbating affective polarisation. Citizens lack, however, time and energy to analyse information on all politicians. Therefore, they use information shortcuts when assessing ideological positions of politicians. Owing to processes such as partisan decline, personalisation and increased intra-party competition, individual cues have become more important as information shortcut. We both test existing theories in a new context, and develop new theories: 

1) We investigate in an experimental design whether citizens use ethnic origin, gender and age as cues to estimate politicians’ positions. 
2) We develop a new explanatory mechanism (‘social position’ explanation), which will be empirically tested, together with the often-cited (but not yet tested) ‘trait’ explanation (linking traits to specific groups) and ‘party’ explanation (linking parties to groups). 
3) By investigating these socio-demographic cues in combination with each other, we link with intersectionality literature and develop new theoretical insights about the interaction and the salience of these characteristics. 
4) We also move beyond a simple left-right dichotomy by using four fine-grained ideological dimensions: socio-economic, moral-ethical, postmaterial and globalization dimension