RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVE ELITES AS SOURCE CUES

Objective: Following the lead of Kuklinski and Hurley (1994), we seek to demonstrate that the use of heuristic principles of judgment can le ad citizens to make questionable political choices. We hypothesize tha t people use the religious content and shun the political content of r eligious conservative source cues like Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition when rendering political judgments. Methods. We test these hypotheses using an experimental design in which the cue subjects rece ive is experimentally controlled. Results. We find chat the use of heu ristic principles of judgment, while promoting efficient and structure d decisionmaking, can sometimes lead people to make questionable polit ical judgments. Our results indicate that our respondents view religio us conservative source cues in religious rather than political terms. These findings suggest that religious liberals will favor policies sup ported by the religious right despite their ideological incompatibilit y, while secular conservatives will oppose policies supported by the r eligious right despite their ideological affinity. Conclusions. These results clearly indicate that when citizens employ heuristic principle s of judgment, the price of efficient decision-making may be inaccurat e political choice. Future research should look more deeply into the a ccuracy-efficiency tradeoff the individual level and at how the religi ous right polarizes public opinion.