Parties’ Perceptions of Individual‐Level Political Competition

Political competition is crucial for representative democracies as it ensures responsive behavior of political actors. Besides a plurality in parties’ policy positions, meaningful competition necessitates citizens to at least consider switching parties from one election to another. The consideration set of citizens – or, of a substantive number of citizens – has to include more than one party to create the possibility of political power shifts which then again motivate political parties to behave responsively. However, in terms of this responsiveness of political actors, the accurate perception of citizens’ consideration sets by political parties is a necessary condition for the proper working of such meaningful competition. Yet, hardly anything is known about how parties perceive their competitive situation regarding potential vote‐switching. Combining original data from the 2017 Bundestag candidate and the post‐election voter survey in Germany, we test whether parties’ perceptions of voter potentials and individuallevel consideration sets correspond to their actual voter potentials. Using electoral candidates to measure a party’s perception of electoral potentials provides as with the unique opportunity to base our study on large N expert judgements as well as to incorporate misconceptions of political competition. The latter would be impossible in, for example, a purely spatial approach relying on the comparison of party and citizens positions. Moreover, we investigate to which degree factors driving parties’ perceptions of their voter potentials, e.g. left‐right placements, are identical to those accounting for the formation of the voters’ consideration sets. Our results have important implications for crucial assumptions underlying spatial models of party competition while at the same time providing a tool to investigate strategic errors by political parties based on misperceptions of political competition regarding volatility.