Personal issue importance effects on voters’ perceptual accuracy of party issue positions

The accuracy of voters’ party position perceptions is critical for the functioning of representative democracy, and recent comparative work has shown that voters generally have accurate perceptions of parties’ left-right ideological positions. Yet, we know little about how the left-right results generalize to single issues and how personal issue importance evaluations shape accuracy. Building on existing work on the consequences of issue importance, we argue that voters seek more information and become more accurate in their perceptions of party issue positions on those issues they deem personally important. However, we also posit that this is likely a curvilinear relationship. For highly important issues, voters are more likely to have strong priors and engage in projection effects of assimilation and contrast, limiting their ability to accurately perceive party positions on highly important issues. Using original voter – and expert-level surveys from ten advanced democracies, we show support for our expectations.