Party and Leader Cues and Referendum Voting: A Survey Experiment in Britain.

Referendums often have little or no overt connections to partisan politics, lacking party campaigns and ballot labels common to most candidate elections. Even for national-level referendums, voters may have scant information about the proposed ballot measure and high uncertainty about the possible outcomes. Although attitudes about the referendum question are decisive for many voters, we contend that cues provided by parties and leaders are important guides for political decision-making when stakes are high and relevant information is in short supply. Our survey experiment -- conducted with a large national sample of the British electorate (N = 17540) in the spring of 2008 -- involves voting in a hypothetical referendum on denying public services to illegal immigrants. We find that party and leader cues are suspect messages with no statistically significant effects. But when these cues are interacted with a voter’s partisan identification and affect for cue givers (party leaders), the cues have highly significant effects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]