Parties’ Views of the Voters and Campaign Strategy: Comparing German, Austrian, and Italian Parties with Respect to Rationality and Emotion

Preceding an election, the contending parties and candidates vie for advantage by courting the voters. Dominant models of party competition derive campaign strategy and behavior from social structure or the axiom of utility maximization. Crucially, most of the literature assumes that parties compete with each other mainly or exclusively on programmatic grounds and uses campaign output, most often manifestos, to test its predictions. In this paper, I access campaign strategy more directly. Analyzing in-depth, semi-structured interviews with party bureaucrats, advertisers, consultants, politicians, and speechwriters involved in the election campaigns of German (2017), Austrian (2017), and Italian (2018) parties, the paper asks: What is parties’ understanding of how voters “work” and how does that influence campaign design? Why are there differences by party? How do the different actors involved in a party’s campaign settle on a common strategy? I am particularly interested in the role that parties accord to voter emotions, that is, how they want to cultivate, mirror, and utilize them. Why do some parties appeal to a “rational” voter while others focus more explicitly and consciously on tapping voter emotions? Though native to political science, the elite-interview method has largely been abandoned in the study of party competition and campaigning. With the continued reconfiguration of socio-structural alignments, directly accessing the perceptions of the involved actors becomes increasingly central to understanding party competition.