Party identification provides citizens with an anchor from which they derive many of their political attitudes and issue preferences. But what happens when people encounter political debates that place their partisan identities and policy attitudes into conflict with one another? This article draws on an original experiment designed to study the effect of debates that cut across people’s partisan identities and policy attitudes. The results show that cross-cutting debates make people less likely to engage in selective exposure, more likely to feel ambivalent toward their political party, and less likely to rely on party cues when rendering a judgment.
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