This research looks at how voters make inferences of politicians’ orientations across distinct issue dimensions. Specifically, it takes the Catalan party system–– generally depicted as being structured along a left-right dimension and a center-periphery dimension––as a case study to examine how voters use party candidates’ perceived orientations on one dimension as a cue for the same candidates’ orientations on the other dimension. Drawing on an embedded online survey experiment that manipulates a fictitious candidate’s policy positions and the ideological dimension of the information provided, it finds evidence for voter inferences from the center-periphery dimension to the left-right dimension, but not in the opposite direction. The sources of this inference asymmetry are explored in relation to the role of territorial identity, the prevalence of ideological stereotypes, and the structure of the party system in impression formation.
