The Times They Are A-Changin': An Experimental Assessment of the Causes and Consequences of Sudden Policy U-Turns

What consequences should political parties expect when they invoke sudden policy U-turns? We establish a synergy between the causes of policy changes and their consequences and argue that voter evaluations of policy shifts will be influenced by their perceptions of why these shifts occurred in the first place. Building on mental models, a notion we borrow from cognitive psychology, we expect that voters will start from their perceptions of whether party change happened on principled grounds or for electoral gains (the premises) and make probabilistic predictions about its level of commitment in the future (the inference). We suggest that, while U-turns, in general, can be damaging to a party's reputation, principled changes brought about by new scientific evidence or major crises should not necessarily have negative implications, because these changes can give the party new grounds of credibility. We test our expectations via a pre-registered randomized survey experiment in Germany (n = 3127) featuring two classes of party change: strategic or principled shifts. We find that voters generally punish political parties when they reverse course regardless of the reason, thus including when external circumstances suggest change may be necessary. Coming from the premise that political and societal change is imperative, these findings have direct implications for democracies.