A Question of Commitment: Investigating how Citizens Perceive Parties’ Strategies when Engaging with Competition in a Multidimensional Issue Space

Established theories of spatial party competition suggest that political actors have various means of engaging positively or negatively with each other, some of which are more and others less effective in keeping challenger parties at bay. What remains understudied is (a) when political actors opt for change over ideological continuity, (b) how they balance strategic and ideological goals when faced with competition from which they cannot easily disengage, and (c) how citizens perceive parties’ and politicians’ strategies towards challengers depending on the forms these strategies take. While being agnostic as to what explains why political actors opt for change or continuity or engage with their competition in a positive or negative manner (see: a), the present paper makes the following twofold contribution: first, it proposes a new theoretical framework for analyses of party strategies in a multidimensional issue space which posits that political actors choose between mere signals of responsiveness and ideologically committed forms of engagement when responding to competition (see: b). Second, the paper proposes a survey experiment designed to ascertain how citizens evaluate parties’ (less committed or more committed) responses to competition (see: c). It does so by varying not only parties’ programmatic choices but also rhetorical choices, that is, how parties justify their programmatic strategies and policy shifts. The survey experiment will be fielded in Austria, in early 2023.