Parties' Group Appeals as Representational Claims—Conceptualization and Measurement

Political parties play a vital role in the political system of representative democracies. They are the vehicle through which people are recruited into politics; they form the governments that steer the state's policies; and they serve the crucial function of representation by linking voters and the government. As part of the democratic "rules of the game," parties compete in periodic general elections to survive as viable representative actors in the political system. During election campaigns, parties reach out to the voters by presenting different messages via various communication channels. Parties appeal to voters by making representational claims—we, party x, are the best party to represent you—because it is in their nature to do so. Parties seek to represent voters. The most common form of party appeal examined by scholars is policy: parties put forward via manifestos, televised or print advertisements, political rallies, etc. the policies they would pursue if returned to office. The focus of this present paper, however, is on a second form of appeal—the group appeal—that parties make, that has received little scholarly attention thus far. Here, rather than “simply” lay out the policies a party will pursue if returned to office, parties state which demographic groups they are appealing to—that they are the party for people like them. This paper joins the most recent efforts to define, measure, and examine parties' group appeals. I offer a constructivist analysis of group appeals based on representation theories, drawing primarily on Saward's (2010) Representative Claim. Conceptualizing group appeals as representational claims, I argue that while acting in their role as representatives in representative democracies, parties make group appeals in the context of election campaigns to indicate that they are the party that would best represent that group. These appeals, defined as an explicit mention of an ascriptive demographic group(s), are differentiated from parties' policy appeals by disentangling who parties are talking to from what they are saying. Understanding the essential nature of groups for the political process, group appeals are viewed not “just” as a strategic decision in the context of party competition but rather as an integral part of the representative process. Such an approach to parties’ behaviour envisions them as more than electoral machines devoted to the pursuit of office or vote maximization, and finds group appeals not just in the legislative actions of individual representatives or in their characteristics. They are also found in statements made by collective bodies, political parties in our case, irrespective of the characteristics of the individuals who compose the party. To examine group appeals empirically, I utilize a novel, comparative, dataset composed of 269 parties' names, manifestos, and print campaign advertisements (broadly defined to include posters, flyers, pamphlets, leaflets, stickers, and ads placed in newspapers) in Israel and the Netherlands between 1977 and 2015. The results show variation in group appeals across time and space, as well as the relationship between group appeals and party family, size, and ideology.