The Clarity Incentive for Issue Engagement

Although parties focus disproportionately on favourable issues in their election campaigns, it is also the case that parties spend much of the ‘short campaign’ addressing the same issues – and especially salient issues. This is surprising from the perspective of the theoretical literature, which has focused on parties’ incentives to campaign on ‘owned issues’ in order to increase the importance voters attach to these issues. We explain this behaviour by proposing that parties face an additional incentive to emphasise issues that are salient to voters: the need to clarify their positions on these issues for sympathetic voters. We formalise this argument using a model of party strategy with endogenous issue salience, and also present evidence from Britain that, consistent with this hypothesis, voter uncertainty is especially costly for parties on salient issues.