How do political parties decide which policy issues to prioritize in election campaigns? Most studies on party competition focus on the type of the party or the shifts in public opinion in order to explain issue priorities of political parties. While these studies have considerably enhanced our understanding of party competition, we argue that one important part of the puzzle is missing: the institutional context. We hypothesize that the electoral strategies of political parties are crucially shaped by the context in which they compete. To test our theoretical claim we rely on data from the Comparative Manifesto and the Euromanifesto projects which have analyzed party manifestos drafted for national and European Parliament elections and provide data on the issues political parties prioritize in their election manifestos. The combination of these two data sources allows for comparing the electoral strategies of the same political parties in two different institutional contexts. Based on multilevel modeling, we examine the effect of the institutional context on political parties competing in national and European elections from 1979 until 2009. Our findings have important implications for understanding parties’ strategies in multi-level electoral settings.
