Cue Taking Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The cue taking model centers upon how a member of a legislative body makes thousands of decisions every term, including those on bills requiring a high level of technical expertise but falling outside particular areas of interest. There is an opportunity cost of time and resources if the representative tries to learn more about those issues. Hence, in order to cope with the volume of decisions, legislators need a technique to deal with the information overload.

There are two sets of actors in the system: cue takers and cue givers. When a members must cast a roll call vote on a complex issue outside their expertise, they behaves as cue takers. Cue takers look for cues provided by cue givers. Cue givers are trusted colleagues who—because of their formal position in the legislature or policy specialization—are more informed on the issue; in addition, cue givers are those individuals with whom the cue taker would probably agree if their own individual research was completed. In that sense, legislators efficiently allocate their resources since they do not need to know about every single bill being voted, and they can trust other legislators who know more about the issue. Many representatives act as cue givers on some issues and cue takers on others.

From this classical usage as proposed by Donald Matthews and James Stimson, political scientists have expanded the study of cue taking to include voters, who take cues from political elites, and outer ring media outlets, which take cues from “prestige” media outlets. These studies show that cue taking is a pervasive phenomenon, but the extent of its importance varies in different populations and must be verified empirically.

Bibliography:

Bianco, William T. “Reliable Source or Usual Suspects? Cue-Taking, Information Transmission, and Legislative Committees.” Journal of Politics 59, no. 3 (1997): 913.
Kuklinski, James H., and Norman L. Hurley. “On Hearing and Interpreting Political Messages: A Cautionary Tale of Citizen Cue-Taking.” Journal of Politics 56, no. 3 (1994): 729–751.
Matthews, Donald R., and James A. Stimson. Yeas and Nays: Normal Decision-Making in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Wiley, 1975.
Shaw, Daron, and Bartholomew Sparrow. “From the Inner Ring Out: News Congruence, Cue-Taking, and Campaign Coverage.” Political Research Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1999): 323–351.
Sullivan, John L., L. Earl Shaw, Gregory E. McAvoy, and David G. Barnum. “The Dimensions of Cue-Taking in the House of Representatives: Variation by Issue Area.” Journal of Politics 55, no. 4 (1993): 975–997.