American liberals and conservatives (mostly) respond the same to party cues

How do people with different political ideologies process political information? Party cues test how people’s judgements on policy issues shift when shown a party/party leader’s endorsement or opposition to the issue. A meta-analysis (Ditto et al., 2019) found that liberals and conservatives were similarly receptive to party cues, shifting their judgement in accordance with their inparty and against their outparty. This finding was criticized, as the empirical studies included in the meta-analysis did not use a representative sample of target issues, limiting the generalizability of the meta-analysis’ conclusions. We address this critique in four preregistered experiments (N’s > 1200), using four measures of ideology. Studies 1 and 2 found convincing evidence for ideological similarities in quota matched samples of Americans. However, Study 3 used a convenience sample and found conservatives were significantly more likely to follow partisan cues. In Study 4, we aimed to resolve this discrepancy using a representative sample of participants and found similarities in cue receptivity on most measures of ideology, except for right-wing authoritarianism. Notably, we replicated ideological differences in cognitive style, suggesting that ideological differences in cognitive style do not necessarily translate into differences in processes for interpreting and integrating partisan-relevant information.