Strategic Ambiguity of Political Parties Across European and National Arenas: Evidence from the Visegrád Countries (2004–2024)

In the European Union’s multilevel political environment, political parties often balance differing expectations at the European and national levels. These structural incentives create favourable conditions for various forms of party ambiguity, a concept that has been understood and operationalized in multiple ways within the literature, ranging from programmatic vagueness to ideological ambivalence or positional inconsistency. This paper focuses specifically on strategic ambiguity—the intentional signalling of inconsistent or even contradictory positions in order to broaden electoral appeal and minimize political risks across institutional arenas. While strategic ambiguity has been widely examined through party rhetoric, manifestos, or elite communication, its manifestation in legislative politics, and particularly in parliamentary voting behaviour, remains comparatively understudied. Moreover, existing research has largely focused on Western European party systems, leaving the dynamics of party ambiguity in Central and Eastern Europe insufficiently explored. This study addresses these gaps by examining the use of strategic ambiguity by political parties in the Visegrád Group (V4) countries across European and national legislative arenas. The EU’s multilevel institutional structure creates multiple opportunities for parties to send different signals “between Brussels and their national capitals,” allowing them to strategically differentiate their positions across political levels. This dynamic is particularly salient for parties from newer EU member states in Central Europe, where European integration continues to be politically contested and electorally sensitive. To capture strategic ambiguity in practice, the paper analyzes roll-call votes on selected EU directives and parliamentary resolutions in the European Parliament, alongside votes on the corresponding transposition legislation and related resolutions in the lower chambers of the national parliaments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Drawing on a time-series dataset covering the period 2004–2024, the study traces the evolution of strategic ambiguity over time and assesses how it relates to contextual factors such as electoral cycles and the maturation of EU membership. The findings provide a valuable lens for understanding how parties operate within multilevel political systems, demonstrating how strategic ambiguity enables parties to appeal simultaneously to pro-integration and Eurosceptic publics. More broadly, the analysis sheds light on the emergence of “two-level” or “two-face” party strategies in newer EU member states and contributes to comparative research on populism, party competition, and multilevel governance.