Niche Parties' Strategies Between Elections: Analysing the Determinants of Nicheness in Parliamentary Activities

The role of niche parties in issue competition has recently been granted increasing scholarly attention and a debate is under way on how to define them in opposition to mainstream parties. Most of the works on the subject focus on electoral competition and use the content of programmatic platforms as their empirical base. Although elections remain focal points for party competition, they represent only one arena where issue competition takes place. This paper sets out to explore the strategies of issue emphasis implemented by niche parties in the course of the electoral mandate by analyzing the kind of topics they address in their questions to the government. The first step is to describe whether the classification of niche parties derived from the analysis of manifestos holds when considering non-legislative activities. The second step is to look more closely at variations in the content of niche parties' legislative and non-legislative activities. What political and institutional factors account for cross-national patterns? The paper builds on a data set providing information on the issue content of parliamentary bills and questions in six european countries (Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal) created using the Comparative Agendas Project coding protocol.