Affective Source Cues: Negativity and Policy Attitudes.

• Author: Hrbkova, Lenka
• Position: POLSCI PAPERS - Report

Introduction

Even though the concept of source cues has been discussed extensively within political science (and political psychology), there has been a surprising lacuna in the literature concerning the concept of negativity in cue taking. Scholars have been (mostly) interested in how partisan identities (e.g. Rahn, 1993; Cohen, 2003; Kam, 2005; Arceneaux, 2008; Malhotra and Kuo, 2008; Nicholson, 2011; Bullock, 2011, Bolsen, Druckman, and Cook, 2013) or other types of positive attachments (Petersen, et al., 2013) towards political parties or leaders influence citizens' attitudes or perception of politics. The purpose of this article is to fill the blank space and to extend the basic source cue research with the effects of negative attachments. The main research question asks whether citizens use negative cues in the same way as positive cues in the process of evaluation of political information.

The traditional notion of "cues" refers to "stimuli in the persuasion context that can affect attitudes without necessitating processing of message arguments" (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986: 18). A cue perceived in this conceptual framework is a datum that people use to infer other information and, by extension, make decisions based on it (Bullock, 2007). Even though cues acquire various forms (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; Popkin, 1991; Lau and Redlawsk, 2006), one of the most common forms of political cues that citizens use is the source of information (e.g. Carmines and Kuklinski, 1990; Mondak, 1993). This type of cue-taking in the course of evaluation of political information means that people focus rather on "who" is saying it rather than on "what" is being said (Kuklinski and Hurley, 1994). Source cues are a powerful concept and play a significant role in public opinion formation and policy preferences.

Most source cue research has been based in the context of US political parties and party identification. This is specific environment in which the same two parties have been competing for over 150 years over a stable set of policy issues, with two main ideologies easily identified with the two-party labels (Tomz and Sniderman, 2005). Sniderman argues that American citizens can make use of cognitive shortcuts "not because they (mysteriously) can simplify public choices effectively but because these choices are systematically simplified for them. Issue alternatives are organized in advance, typically binary, mutually exclusive, and characteristically exhaustive" (Sniderman, 2000: 81). (2) This article extends the rather limited body of research of source cues outside the US (Merolla, Stephenson, and Zechmeister, 2007, 2008; Brader and Tucker, 2009; Brader, Duell, and Tucker, 2013; Petersen et al., 2013; Capelos, 2010; Samuels and Cesar Zucco Jr., 2014) and sets the source cue research in the context of the multiparty system of the Czech Republic, which has generally lower levels of party identification and a decreasing party system stability.

Source Cues and Affect: Literature Review

The literature on source cues has had a long tradition, as the concept has been perceived as an important step towards understanding how voters perceive politics. William McGuire emphasized that a citizen is "a lazy organism who relies on source cues and tries to master the message contents only when it is absolutely necessary. When the purported source is clearly positively or negatively valenced, he uses this information as a cue to accept or reject the message's conclusions without absorbing the arguments used" (McGuire, 1969: 198). The source cue hypothesis states that the source or authorship of information can be used as information itself. The available literature indicates that source cues influence various aspects of judgment and behaviour, e.g. blame attribution (Malhotra and Kuo, 2008), vote choice (Arceneaux and Kolodny, 2009; Boudreau, 2009), the estimation of the ideological position of social groups (Brady and Sniderman, 1985) as well as of candidates (Rahn, 1993), evaluation and support for a policy (Cohen, 2003; Mondak, 1993), changes of position on issues (Carsey and Layman, 2006), and support for political values (Goren, Federico, and Kittilson, 2009). Much of the available literature suggests that source cues move people's opinions on a variety of topics, regardless whether the source is a politician (Capelos, 2009; Mondak, 1993; Kuklinski and Hurley, 1994), an opinion leader (Druckman, 2001), media (Turner, 2007), an ordinary person (Boudreau, 2009), or a political party (e.g. Rahn, 1993; Cohen, 2003; Kam, 2005; Bullock, 2011; Clark and Kastellec, 2015). Political parties are one of the most common sources of political information. Parties are also one of the most commonly used political cues which help people navigate through the complex political world (Lau and Redlawsk, 2006; Popkin, 1991; Bartels, 2002) and their influence on citizens has been traditionally assessed by the concept of party identification (Campbell et al., 1960).

Even though the traditional approach towards source cues suggests that cues can work as a cognitive shortcut leading to low-effort judgement, it is also possible to understand cues as a trigger of more elaborate and effortful directional motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990; Lodge and Taber, 2013). Motivated reasoning occurs when "a person is motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion" (Kunda 1990, p. 236). Identification with a political party might lead citizens to defend their political beliefs, attitudes, or identities in case of dissonant information. Motivated reasoning means seeking out information that confirms one's prior attitudes, counter-argue information incongruent to their prior attitudes and perceiving congruent information as stronger compared to information inconsistent with one's prior attitudes (Lodge and Taber, 2013; Bolsen, Druckman, and Cook, 2013, Leeper and Slothuus, 2014). The first approach assumes parties to be an information shortcut which helps citizens to form opinions consistent with their attitudes, the second approach, on the other hand, assumes that partisan identification motivates citizens to maintain their prior attitudes. The two approaches differ in their notion of how parties affect citizen's motivation to process information and how much effort is actually put into information processing. However, both traditions of research assume that political actors such as parties are a key factor in public opinion formation. Directional motivated reasoning has been tested dominantly in the context of the US politic, which is significantly determined by partisan identification. Identity is an important factor underling cognitive processes (Leeper and Slothuus, 2014).

Outside the US context, however, the research of cue-taking based on party identification is rather ambiguous. In Brazil, partisans do use their party identities as a heuristic (Samuels and Cesar Zucco Jr., 2014). In Canada, on the other hand, partisan cues do not influence policy attitudes in a predicted way (Merolla, Stephenson, and Zechmeister, 2008). Inconclusive results from Europe suggest that partisan cue- taking is influenced by structural factors of the political environment, such as party system stability (Brader, Duell, and Tucker, 2012; also see Gheorghita, 2015 on the significance of party identification). This study follows the previous research on partisan cues outside of the USA, but it builds on the affective approach to politics. Instead of the traditional concept of party identification (Campbell et al., 1960) it derives the attachments to political parties from simple emotional reactions towards political actors. Affect and emotions have been considered an inseparable part of human reasoning (Zajonc, 1994; Damasio, 1994) and lately emotions have been integrated into the understanding of how citizens perceive politics (e.g. Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen, 2000; Lodge and Taber, 2013). Basic likes and dislikes towards political actors are powerful cues that voters may use to assess policy attitudes (Sniderman et al., 1991; Lodge and Taber, 2013). Affective evaluation of political parties may serve as a more appropriate measure of citizens' attachment to political parties in a non-American context than the traditional concept of party identification (e.g. Petersen et al., 2013; Brader and Tucker, 2009; Brader, Tucker, and Duell, 2012). The concept of affective source cues differs from the traditional notion of cues in the context of partisanship as a form of identity identification. The affective source cue approach does not assume that a political party is the basis of social identity, developed early in life and highly stable. Instead the affective source cue approach assumes the source cues to evoke simple affective evaluations of political concepts--which may be either positive or negative in nature.

The available research examined source cues solely in terms of positive attachments towards the source of the political information--either in the form of traditional party identification, or positive party evaluation. Surprisingly, any systematic investigation of the role of negative feelings towards political parties has been missing. The goal of this study is to contribute to the source cue literature with research on negatively perceived source cues and their effects on policy attitudes. This lacuna is especially notable since negativity plays an important role in the psychology of object evaluation and cognitive processes. Within a decision-making process, potential losses are considered more important than potential gains, negative information is more salient and memorable, it provides a higher information value compared to positive information and it is more easily retrieved from long-term memory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Skowronski and Carlston, 1989; Kreitler and Kreitler, 1968). Negativity bias occurs in the basic evaluative processes underlying...