The best of both worlds: How parties combine policy issues and group appeals

Social identities and group attitudes are important drivers for political behavior. Yet, despite growing interest into parties' strategic appeals to social groups, we know little about how such communication fits with a parties' more general campaign strategy on policy issues. The usage of group appeals in combination with policy proposals provides parties with considerable leeway: they are relatively unconstrained to emphasize or downplay the consequences of certain policies and how they may vary across affected groups. Drawing on theories of issue competition, we develop and test new theoretical arguments on the combined usage of policy and group appeals. We expect that parties generally have an incentive to underpin communication on their most advantageous issues with frequent appeals to social groups to capitalize on group attitudes and social identity. Typically, parties will link groups associated with a specific issue. Yet, parties might also deliberately choose to provide links between issue A and group B to build on their existing strengths in one or both aspects. Thereby, parties could try to further extend their competitive advantage in a particular policy area or switch the framing of unfavorable issues and groups – a typical example would be radical right parties linking immigrants to the economy or social welfare. To test these expectations, we combine original data on issue emphasis and group appeals from election manifestos (1990-2019) with public opinion data on party issue competence in Austria.