This article builds on previous work suggesting that political parties are invested in some political issues over others. We argue that to address uncomfortable political issues, parties present vague or duplicitous positions -- a strategy we call position blurring. We theorizing and demonstrating various strategies of issue position blurring, that we call 1) muting, 2) clouding, 3) embedding and 4) reframing. While strategically distinct, all these forms of blurring allow parties to obfuscate their placement and thus obscure the distance from their voters. We use unique data collected during three Dutch elections in the period 2006-2012 in which we confronted political parties with discrepancies between their self-placement on salient issues and issue-position estimates based on analysis of their party platform by experts. The article demonstrates that on the aggregate level, blurring is a mechanism of ideological innovation, as it may lead to incremental restructuring of political space.
