Existing research has repeatedly discussed how citizens make up their minds when voting on direct-democratic proposals. While previous studies have emphasized the role of policy information and party cues on opinion formation, we explore the mechanisms behind policy and party effects in greater detail. We conceptualize vote decisions as multidimensional choices, and use a three-wave conjoint analysis to observe if and how policy preferences change over the course of a campaign. We find that preferences towards a policy proposal remain consistent, but may change if an issue is intensively discussed during the campaign and does not already rally strong support or opposition. Moreover, the effect of party information is only tangible for voters with an explicit party affiliation, while larger coalitions of parties in support or in opposition of the proposal do not inherently gather more support.

中文翻译：

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政策和政党信息在直接民主运动中的作用

现有研究反复讨论了公民在对直接民主提案进行投票时如何下定决心。虽然之前的研究强调了政策信息和政党线索在意见形成中的作用，但我们更详细地探讨了政策和政党影响背后的机制。我们将投票决策概念化为多维选择，并使用三波联合分析来观察政策偏好是否以及如何在竞选过程中发生变化。我们发现对政策提案的偏好保持一致，但如果在竞选期间对某个问题进行了深入讨论并且尚未获得强烈支持或反对，则可能会发生变化。此外，政党信息的影响仅对具有明确政党从属关系的选民而言是有形的，