The Logic of Conflict Extension: Mainstreaming Political Entrepreneurship in Electoral Competition

Political parties routinely introduce new issues into electoral competition, yet the strategic ambiguity involved in such innovations remains poorly understood. Existing scholarship often treats forms of blurring—vagueness, mixed signals, contradictory cues, avoidance, and inconsistency—as functionally equivalent. In this paper, I show that parties’ issue innovations embed distinct forms of structured ambiguity that arise from their structural position in the party system and serve different political purposes. I argue that ambiguity is not merely a communicative artifact but an integral component of political entrepreneurship: a mechanism through which parties navigate risk, manage coalitional tensions, and shape voter perceptions of competence and responsiveness. The paper develops a theoretical framework that distinguishes between two forms of entrepreneurial ambiguity: conflict extension and realignment. Insecure incumbents—parties with established bases but precarious electoral margins—engage in conflict extension by introducing issues that are politically novel yet socially consensual. These issues broaden the agenda while reinforcing the dominant cleavage, generating a form of ambiguity that signals responsiveness without threatening internal cohesion. Such ambiguity is deliberate: it allows incumbents to appear adaptive while avoiding clear commitments on divisive cross-cutting issues. New entrants, by contrast, engage in realignment by advancing issues that are politically neglected but socially polarizing. This form of ambiguity differs in kind: rather than softening or blurring commitments, these parties strategically deploy cross-cutting, high-affect issue cues whose implications are intentionally open-ended, inviting citizens to infer broader programmatic change or systemic disruption. These distinct forms of ambiguity also shape how citizens interpret party motives. Conflict extension cues lead voters to infer competence, stability, and incremental responsiveness; realignment cues lead voters to infer dissatisfaction with existing alignments and openness to structural change. These inferences condition trust, responsibility attributions, and perceptions of risk and reward in electoral choice. I test these expectations using a preregistered conjoint survey experiment conducted during the 2025 state legislative elections in Bihar, India—a setting characterized by intense multiparty competition and layered forms of insecurity. The design contrasts two types of insecure incumbents (the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal) with a credible new entrant (the Jan Suraj Party). Candidate profiles vary along three issue domains—gender, identity and inclusion, and employment—each containing a party’s official position and a locally salient alternative identified through extensive field group discussions. The results reveal a systematic divergence in entrepreneurial ambiguity. Insecure incumbents privilege consensual cues that reinforce the dominant coalition structure, generating ambiguity that minimizes risk while sustaining trust and perceived competence. New entrants deploy cross-cutting cues that reduce polarization along the dominant alignment, generating ambiguity that maximizes potential reward by eliciting affective responses and inviting voters to infer broader programmatic change. Together, the findings show how structured forms of ambiguity link party strategy, citizen interpretation, and the reproduction or transformation of partisan competition, and they highlight ambiguity as a general mechanism of democratic adaptation under conditions of uncertainty.