Political Parties and Value Consistency in Public Opinion Formation

Abstract

Many have been concerned about the ability of citizens to ground their specific political preferences in more general principles. We test the longstanding intuition that political elites, and political parties in particular, can help citizens improve the quality of their political opinions—understood as the consistency between citizens’ specific opinions and their deeper political values. We integrate two major areas of research in political behavior that rarely speak together—political parties and framing—to argue that the structure of party competition frames issues by signaling what political values are at stake and hence enables citizens to take the side most consistent with their basic principles. With a unique experimental design embedded in a nationally representative survey, we find strong support for this argument. Our findings imply that low levels of value-opinion consistency are driven not only by citizens’ lack of interest in politics but also by parties failing in providing clear signals.