03-20-2015

doi:10.7910/DVN/24591

Recent studies analyze how citizens update their perceptions of parties' Left-Right positions in response to new political information. We extend this research to consider the issue of European integration, and we report theoretical and empirical analyses that citizens do not update their perceptions of parties' positions in response to election manifestos, but that citizens' perceptions of parties' positions do track political experts' perceptions of these positions, and, moreover, that it is party supporters who disproportionately perceive their preferred party's policy shifts. Given that experts plausibly consider a wide range of information, these findings imply that citizens weigh the wider informational environment when assessing parties' positions. We also present evidence that citizens' perceptions of party position shifts matter, in that they drive partisan sorting in the mass public.

James Adams; Lawrence Ezrow; Zeynep Somer-Topcu, 2014, "Replication data for: Do Voters Respond to Party Manifestos or to a Wider Information Environment?", http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24591, Harvard Dataverse, V2

James Adams

Lawrence Ezrow

Zeynep Somer-Topcu

Harvard University

SCR:011273

DataVerse

Dataverse Network Project

SCR:001997