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

Which matters more for voters, the political party or the policy positions of electoral candidates? We contribute to this long standing debate by analyzing the relative importance of policy content and party cues in the multi-party Canadian context. Using 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 employ a conjoint survey experiment to test whether the effect of an electoral candidate’s policy position on their evaluation by voters depends on the implicit party cues that are embedded in the policy. We find that while Canadians often associate policies with specific parties, they do not seem to use these implicit party cues in their evaluation of the candidates, focusing on policy congruence instead. Second, we test whether explicit party cues reduce the weight of policy information 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 with low polarization, and that voters rely on policy information to make decisions in these contexts.