Single Issue, Only Issue? Niche Parties' Strategy for Policy Choices aside their 'Core Issue'

The research on 'niche parties' as a distinct group of parties has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Electorally successful niche parties have been showed to exert influence on the political agenda as well as programmatic and strategic choices of their mainstream counterparts. As suggested by several authors, this type of parties obviously submits to strategic rationales that are different from those of mainstream parties. This causes them in consequence to react differently to the same political environment. While niche parties identify themselves by definition with a single (or very few) important 'core' issue(s) such as immigration or environment, not much is known about their behavior with respect to their strategy for choosing positions on 'mainstream issues' such as economic questions or other niche parties' core issues. Though, organizational and ideological reasons suggest that niche parties and mainstream parties behave structurally different when it comes to choose policy positions outside their core issues. For instance, given that niche parties have regularly come into existence to promote issues they believe to be neglected by traditional parties, one would expect them to be ideologically more cohesive on their core issue than on the other issues. Alternatively, one might wonder what is their strategy regarding issues which are important for the voters but do not count among a niche party's core issues. Finally, the existence or non existence of a comprehensive policy platform outside their core issues may be simply a function of a niche party's organizational resources. This paper seeks to explore this kind of questions by analyzing recent election manifestos of niche and mainstream parties in German federal and state level elections with the help of quantitative methods in order to explore the existing variation in their programmatic choices and offer explanations for it.