A lot of people think that party choices are based on policy preferences. But quite frequently, it is the other way round: people change their policy preferences to fit their party allegiance fivethirtyeight.com/features/peopl…
This is really not as widely known and discussed as it should be, as the implications are profound. Arguably, one thing many of those around Corbyn got right was to reject the New Labour arg that the party had to adapt to what voters wanted 2/?
3/? The Corbynist view (or, at least, my interpretation of one part of it) was "no, if we can get people to like us and be loyal to us, we can convince them to change their views and support the policies we think are best". The very careful evidence reviewed in the linked piece
suggests that will often be the case (though not always). Americans' views on race and gender changed to match those of the parties/politicians they supported (and to distance themselves from parties/politicians they rejected).
I don't think it need only be political parties that drive this. Brexit, for example, could have similar effects - particularly as people didn't start with very strong or well informed views.
How many Remain and Leave supporters had strong views on, for example, customs unions pre-Brexit? How many do now? How many happen to have adopted, strongly, the view of their "tribe" as the "obvious" and "right" view? How many even realise they had no view before?
Again, the implications are really important. "We must deliver the Brexit the people demanded" is a frequent mantra of politicians in the Brexit debate. But what does that mean if what people want is in part driven by what they think people in their tribe want?
To put it another way, if Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Davis, The Sun, The Mail etc all started saying that Norway Brexit was the Right Brexit, how many of those currently demanding Hard Brexit would shift their views to Norway? Evidence from elsewhere suggests quite a lot might...
Another important implication of these findings - if people's views on gender and race are in part a response to partisan cues, then the choices parties (and other elites) make really matter. If parties signal that attitudes and behaviours are unacceptable, this can matter.
Relatedly, if parties and other elites signal that an extreme actor in the system is unacceptable, then voters may move away from that actor and from views/behaviours they associate with the bad actor.
Conversely, if parties and other elites signal that intolerant views, or extreme parties, are acceptable then voters may respond to this cue by being more receptive to/accepting of such views. Social norms matter, and elite cues shape social norms.
To put it another way, the demands we sometimes see for politicians to "listen to public concerns" is more complicated than it looks - because the concerns and the response are not independent. Parties' choices to endorse or reject concerns can change the nature of such concerns.
(concluding caveat - none of this is to argue that politicians can convince voters of anything they want, or some such. Obviously all this is a matter of degree, it is just to highlight that the causal arrow runs both ways: voters influence parties, but parties also infl voters)
