An Ideologue by Any Other Name? Party, Gender, and Race Cues in Foreign Policy Support

Voters are often at a disadvantage in assessing policies when possessing limited information. Although party identification has long served as an important heuristic to inform preferences, there is support for the notion that party attachment may amplify race and gender stereotypes about elected officials. In this paper, we evaluate how race and gender might also condition attitudes towards elected officials by serving as indicators of a politician’s ideology. Using foreign policy positions as a “low-information” environment in which respondents should be more susceptible to cues, we find that some partisans rate support for policy statements lower when they are attributed to politicians from the opposite party. More importantly, this effect is further conditioned by race and gender cues as a function of a respondent’s ideology.