Consensus is a Cue for Quality
survey experiment
perceived polarization
bipartisanship
Does bipartisan support for legislation signal high policy quality or undesirable policy concessions? Existing theories of elite cues offer competing predictions. We argue that this tension arises because citizens attend to both valence and spatial dimensions of policy, but the meaning of bipartisan support depends on which is focal. We develop a social learning model with focal information processing and test its implications using two preregistered survey experiments.