Elite Cue Experiment

An elite cue experiment isolates the persuasive power of source endorsements by holding a policy message constant and randomly varying who is said to support it. Grounded in John Zaller's receive-accept-sample model of mass opinion, which holds that citizens take cues from trusted political elites rather than reasoning from first principles, the design reveals how much opinion moves simply because a party or leader takes a side. Stephen Nicholson's work on polarizing cues shows that in-party endorsements can persuade while out-party endorsements provoke backlash, making the cue, not the argument, the engine of opinion change.