Appealing Broadly or Narrowing Down? Explaining Parties’ Issue Salience Strategies in Election Campaigns

‘Responsible’ parties present voters with clear, consistent and differentiated policy packages. Voters are then able to hold governing parties accountable by comparing policy promises with actual policy performance. The link between party behavior and the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable is complicated since parties have an incentive to present ambiguous policy platforms as to appeal to diverse groups of voters. This incentive has become increasingly strong in the context of dealignment, which pushes parties to seek new constituencies beyond their traditional support base. I argue that an attractive strategy for parties to pursue this goal is issue-diversification: increasing the scope of their policy appeals by adding new issues to their agenda. However, the more diverse the platform of a party, the more difficult it becomes for voters to distill what the party actually stands for, which might hinder accountability relations to emerge. As such, it is crucial to understand parties’ issue strategies: when do parties diversify, and when do they narrow down their agenda? I argue that parties change the scope of their policy agenda in response to vote loss, losing access to office and in response to other parties’ issue strategies. However, the extent to which parties respond to these external stimuli is conditional upon their internal balance of power, as party leaders seek to satisfy vote-seeking goals whereas party activists want the party to focus on a narrow set of issues that ‘speak to the base’. These theoretical expectations are tested using panel-data regression techniques on party-manifesto data, which allows for retrieving a measurement of the scope of parties’ policy agendas, and expert-survey data, indicating parties’ internal organizational structure. The results of analyses of parties’ agendas in 17 European democracies in the period 1970-2010 have important implications for our understanding of party strategy and accountability relations.