Not All Speech That Wanders Is Lost: Competence Signaling and Obfuscation in Party Policy Appeals

A central theme in the party competition literature suggests that parties often deliberately obscure their positions to avoid electoral risk. Existing accounts would therefore interpret policy mixing—parties' tendency to address multiple policy issues concurrently—as a voluntary blurring strategy. This paper challenges that prevailing interpretation. We argue that policy mixing is a contingent strategy whose function depends on the policy domain in which it occurs. In parties’ core policy domains, mixing serves to subsume and integrate auxiliary issues into a causal narrative tied to the party’s primary agenda (e.g., a green party linking climate policy to infrastructure and job creation). In this context, mixing signals competence and emphasizes the cross-cutting relevance of the party’s main issue. By contrast, policy mixing in peripheral areas fulfills a blurring function. Here, mixing facilitates obfuscation and allows parties to conceal their true policy positions (or their distributional consequences), which serves to manage internal conflict and attract a larger voter pool. This means that policy mixing is not a unitary communicative act and that its electoral and democratic implications depend on where it occurs within a party’s issue portfolio. To empirically distinguish these mechanisms and ascertain how consistently parties apply them, we analyze election manifestos and parliamentary speeches across multiple party systems and develop a novel LLM–based measure of policy mixing in political text.