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<p>Which matters more to voters, the political party or the policy positions of electoral candidates? We contribute to this longstanding debate by analyzing the relative importance of policy information and party cues in the multi-party Canadian context. The Canadian case allows us to disentangle the effects of policy and party on voter decision-making, which are closely intertwined in the more polarized and extensively studied U.S. case. First, we use a conjoint survey experiment to test whether implicit party cues embedded in policies shape voters’ evaluations of electoral candidates. We find that while Canadians often associate policies with specific parties – what we call <i>policy partisanship</i>, they do not seem to use these implicit party cues in their evaluation of candidates, focusing on policy congruence instead. Second, we test whether explicit party cues reduce the weight of policy congruence in candidate evaluations and find that they do not. Overall, our findings suggest that party cues are not as useful for voters in multi-party systems or moderately polarized systems, and that voters rely on policy information to make electoral decisions.</p>

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Party or Policy? The Role of Policy Partisanship in Voter Decision-Making

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月19日

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  • Clareta Treger,
  • Thomas Galipeau,
  • Thomas Bergeron,
  • Sarah Lachance,
  • Natasha Goel,
  • Md Mujahedul Islam,
  • Blake Lee-Whiting,
  • Beatrice Magistro,
  • Peter John Loewen

摘要

Which matters more to voters, the political party or the policy positions of electoral candidates? We contribute to this longstanding debate by analyzing the relative importance of policy information and party cues in the multi-party Canadian context. The Canadian case allows us to disentangle the effects of policy and party on voter decision-making, which are closely intertwined in the more polarized and extensively studied U.S. case. First, we use a conjoint survey experiment to test whether implicit party cues embedded in policies shape voters’ evaluations of electoral candidates. We find that while Canadians often associate policies with specific parties – what we call policy partisanship, they do not seem to use these implicit party cues in their evaluation of candidates, focusing on policy congruence instead. Second, we test whether explicit party cues reduce the weight of policy congruence in candidate evaluations and find that they do not. Overall, our findings suggest that party cues are not as useful for voters in multi-party systems or moderately polarized systems, and that voters rely on policy information to make electoral decisions.