Cueing Without Parties: Experimental Evidence from Peru

Abstract Citizens infer policy information from partisan cues, yet their utility varies cross-nationally. In weakly institutionalized democracies with short-lived political parties and volatile party systems, partisan cues are likely of little heuristic value. I argue that in these contexts, citizens leverage alternative political markers, such as ideological or political movement-related categories, to make sense of the political arena. I test this argument in Peru, a country with an extremely volatile and distrusted party system. Using a survey experiment, I show that political cues significantly influence policy preferences even in the absence of clear and strong partisan brands. Further analysis using causal forest reveals that movement-related political identities are the primary moderators of cueing effects, outweighing traditional factors such as partisanship or ideology. Notably, while non-partisan cues influence attitude formation, only outgroup cues effectively shape preferences. I theorize that this asymmetry could potentially stem from two distinct features of the Peruvian political landscape: deep mistrust in political parties and patterns of affective polarization marked by stronger outgroup prejudice than ingroup favoritism. Overall, this study underscores the importance of alternative forms of political identification in weakly institutionalized party systems, extending existing theories of public opinion formation to diverse democratic settings.