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This paper examines if, when, and to what extent U.S. minor party labels influence individual opinions over a range of political issues. Based on data from an experimental study, we reach three general conclusions. First, as cues, party labels are more likely to influence opinions over complex issues. Second, familiarity with and trust in a party condition cue acceptance. Third, as a whole, minor party labels act as effective cues less consistently than major parties. This finding, we suggest, indicates that there exists some threshold level of familiarity and trust that minor parties must reach in the mass public in order to be effective cues. This research is valuable because it extends current work on party labels as heuristic devices and more general work on cues; our findings are additionally important given recent trends in public opinion data, which indicate that the U.S. public is becoming more accepting of minor parties as permanent features of the political system.

THIS STUDY SHOWS THAT THE LABELS "REPUBLICAN" AND "DEMOCRAT" HAVE STRONG COGNITIVE PROPERTIES, AND THAT WHAT DISCRIMINATES ONE CONCEPT FROM THE OTHER REFERS MAINLY TO (1) VOTING BEHAVIOR, (2) ELECTIONEERING, AND (3) OTHER FORMS OF CONVENTIONAL ELECTORAL BEHAVIOR. THE CONCEPT "INDEPENDENT" IS AMBIGUOUSLY DEFINED AND ONLY WEAKLY DISTINGUISHABLE FROM OTHER CONCEPTS.

We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individual legislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators' preferences are private information, and they have two means of communicating their preferences to voters. First, they each have a "party label" that credibly identifies an interval within which their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votes may convey additional information about their preferences. Each legislator must therefore tailor his or her votes to his or her district in order to forestall a reelection challenge from the opposing party. In equilibrium, nonsincere voting records will occur mostly in moderate districts, where extreme incumbents are vulnerable to challenges from relatively centrist candidates. In those districts, the most extreme legislators may even choose to vote sincerely and retire rather than compile a moderate voting record. Thus, both roll call scores and candidate types will be responsive to district type. An empirical test of shifts in roll call scores of retiring House members in moderate districts confirms these findings.

The vast majority of states use elections to select at least some of their judges. The chief institutional variation in these contests is whether the candidates' partisanship appears on the ballot. This article expands on the extant literature with new data to examine how providing a party label influences voters' decisions. Using a survey experiment involving a low-visibility state appellate court, we find that affixing party labels to judicial candidates often helps our subjects select the candidate who is most aligned with their own party attachment and with their policy interests—an outcome that is especially notable for self-identified independents. We also show that the presence of party labels reduces the effect of another cue, gender. The results add context to the debate over the merits and drawbacks of partisan versus nonpartisan elections.

Les étiquettes des partis politiques, les termes qu'utilisent les parlementaires pour définir leur affiliation partisanne sont autant d'idéologies, de programmes sous forme concentrée. Etudier l'évolution linguistique de tels termes, c'est étudier l'évolution de tout un ensemble de forces et d'idées politiques. L'avantage de lier l'étude politique à l'étude sémantique consiste à réduire un ensemble de données trop complexes à des proportions réduites, celles du vocabulaire, et surtout à permettre l'application des lois de la sémantique à la mesure de l'évolution politique.Faite à partir d'un échantillonnage systématique (de 10 en 10 ans) duParliamentary Guide,cette étude analyse les termes dont se sont servis législateurs provinciaux et fédéraux, de 1878 à 1968, pour décrire leur parti ou tendance politique; elle mesure ainsi le succès et les transformations linguistiques des principaux symboles politiques utilisés au Canada au cours du siècle dernier.Le succès du terme Libéral, par rapport à ses rivaux, apparait non seulement dans sa dominance historique et géographique mais aussi dans sa résistance à la formation de mots composés et dans son pouvoir de rejeter les qualificatifs qui lui furent attachés. Ce succès est attribué, bien sûr, aux forces politiques qui se sont groupées sous le terme Libéral mais il parait dû aussi à la valeur expressive du mot lui même; mot qui exprime bien les valeurs dominantes de la société canadienne du vingtième siècle; mot qui, de plus, est le seul parmi ses principaux rivaux à passer presque sans tranformation de l'une dans l'autre des deux principales langues de la fédération.Il apparaît ainsi que la simple étude de l'évolution non seulement du sens mais aussi de la forme des mots permet d'identifier et de mesurer l'évolution politique d'une societé.

We study a model of party formation in which the informativeness of party labels and inter-party ideological heterogeneity are endogenously and jointly determined in response to electoral incentives. Parties use screening to increase the cost of affiliation for politicians whose ideal points diverge from the party platform. Because affiliation decisions are endogenous, increased screening decreases ideological heterogeneity, improving the informativeness of the party label. The model allows us to examine how the level of screening responds to changes in both the institutional and electoral environments. We find that screening (and, consequently, the informativeness of the party label and ideological homogeneity) is decreasing in the power of the executive branch, the polarization of party platforms, and the average size of partisan tides.