In any democracy, it is crucial to understand how citizens form political opinions. A long-standing, but little researched, claim in political science is that citizens can participate meaningfully in democracy because political parties provide a vital informational basis citizens can use to inform their policy opinions. However, despite decades of research on political parties, this fundamental idea about how democracy works has received surprisingly little attention and never been developed or tested. We simply lack a theory of when, how – or even if – parties provide policy information citizens can use to inform their opinions.
Scholars widely agree that the positions parties take on policy issues exert a major influence on citizens’ policy opinions. However, current literature emphasizes how parties distort citizens’ decision-making and make them dogmatic defenders of their party. Alternatively, scholars see parties as “shortcuts” citizens use parties to avoid engaging any policy-relevant considerations. In contrast, we lack a theoretical model of how citizens can use parties to inform their opinions. This is a serious shortcoming because we do not know whether – or to what extent – citizens use parties in a sophisticated manner to pursue their interests, or if parties merely seduce citizens to support policies that confirm their partisan identity but might go against their interests.
PARTYOPINION seeks to advance the long-standing debate about how parties influence citizens’ opinions by developing a novel theoretical model of the informational role of parties and by proposing a new methodological approach combining experiments with a comparative, cross-national design. The overall research question of PARTYOPINION is: When and how do citizens use political parties to inform their policy opinions?
The project will provide new theoretical and empirical tools to analyze how the current dramatic changes in party systems across Western Europe might affect the ability of political parties to inform citizens’ policy opinions. Given the significant differences across party systems in Western Europe, we should expect substantial variation between countries, parties, and individuals in the extent to which parties’ policy positions inform citizens’ policy opinions. Yet, we have no systematic evidence on how – or even if – this variation affects citizens’ use of parties to inform their opinions.
The PARTYOPINION project will help understand how the current transformations of Western European party systems affect citizens’ ability to participate meaningfully in democracy, and whether parties play a central role in that process. If modern democracy, in Schattschneider’s celebrated phrase, is “unthinkable” without political parties, what happens if their legitimacy and potential relevance are challenged? Will citizens still use parties to inform their policy opinions, and can party leaders exert political leadership?
