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Despite generations of research, political scientists have trouble pinpointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment—they are "pretreated." This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of "pretreatment" from outside the experiment—exposure-based and reputation-based—dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants—who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment—are the most sensitive to this interference from real-world context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.

Issue frames in policy discourse and news reporting regularly influence citizens' political opinions. Yet, we only have a limited understanding of how and among whom these framing effects occur. I propose a dual‐process model of issue framing effects arguing that we must understand mediators of framing (the how question) in connection with individual‐level moderators of framing (the whom question). Experimental results show that issue framing affects opinion through different psychological processes depending on who the receiver of the frame is. Among the moderately politically aware or those having weak political values, framing effects were mediated through processes of changing importance of considerations as well as changing content of considerations. Among the highly aware, only the importance change process mediated framing effects, while there were no framing effects among those least aware or those having strong values.

Recent studies of welfare state retrenchment have argued that policy makers can win public support for welfare state reform by framing the issue in terms of deservingness of welfare recipients. However, this literature has not tested the argument at the individual level. Using a Scandinavian context, this experimental study investigates how alternative framing of a welfare state retrenchment proposal affects citizens' perception of welfare recipients' deservingness, policy support and whether perceptions of deservingness mediate policy opinion. A news story was manipulated to present welfare recipients as either deserving or undeserving of welfare benefits. This issue framing affected citizens' perception of deservingness as well as support for retrenchment policy. Opinion change was partly explained by differences in perceptions of deservingness. These results provide strong support for the effectiveness of the deservingness frame.

Even rough groupings of individuals according to education and occupation reveal marked differences in opinions. What explains the relation between position in the social structure and political views? Building on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory on social praxis and his three-dimensional class concept, the article answers this question. A Bourdieu-inspired analysis reveals larger social differences in opinion formation than previous studies. Even within an apparently homogenous group of political science students there are clear and systematic differences in opinions that can be traced back to the individual student's social background. The article also shows that the ability to articulate an opinion is socially conditioned.

Even rough groupings of individuals according to education and occupation reveal marked differences in opinions. What explains the relation between position in the social structure and political views? Building on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory on social praxis and his three-dimensional class concept, the article answers this question. A Bourdieu-inspired analysis reveals larger social differences in opinion formation than previous studies. Even within an apparently homogenous group of political science students there are clear and systematic differences in opinions that can be traced back to the individual student's social background. The article also shows that the ability to articulate an opinion is socially conditioned. Adapted from the source document.