The effect of real‐news party cues

Abstract News media routinely offer cues about the stances of party elites, but to what extent do these cues shape the policy opinions of the public? While numerous experiments find that partisans adopt the stances of their leaders, these findings may not generalize easily to the context of real news, which often contains richer policy information and more subtle, ambiguous party cues than the artificial stimuli commonly employed. To investigate the impact of party cues as they naturally appear in news coverage—what I term real‐news party cues —I develop a new experimental paradigm. I first sample 70 articles covering political proposals from a large pool of real news and prepare two versions of each: one with and one without these cues. These articles then serve as stimuli in survey experiments among representative samples of Americans ( n = 12,177). I find that real‐news party cues have mostly modest effects on policy opinions.