Timea Balogh (PhD candidate) and Professor James Adams, along with co-authors Will Horne, Simon Weschle, and Christopher Wlezien, recently published an article in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, titled "Does political sophistication moderate how citizens use information to infer left-right distances between parties?" Much prior research examines what shapes citizens’ perceptions of parties’ positions, including histories of co-governance, the left-right tone of their election manifestos, and media reports of their public interactions. The authors ask: do these effects vary for different types of citizens? Analyzing 51 CSES election surveys in 18 countries, they find only selective and modest evidence that political sophistication moderates citizens' reliance on different information cues. The more sophisticated tend to react somewhat more strongly to differences in party manifestos and media reports of party interactions. However, overall, the various information cues available to citizens are used in fairly similar ways by the more and less politically sophisticated. These findings speak to our understanding of electoral behavior and parties' electoral strategies. You can read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2024.2429533