Politicizing Place: How Political Parties Use Local Appeals in National Campaigns - A Mixed-Methods Study

From a voter perspective, we know that the local matters. Across Western democracies, regional marginalisation and place-based resentment drive political attitudes and voting behaviour (De Lange et al., 2023). The populist radical right vote in particular has been explained as a “revenge of the places that don’t matter” (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). In our study, we look at the flip side of this issue, and focus on how national political parties address (perceived) geographical disparities. Parties might make the local level salient in their campaign to tap into local discontent. However, this has been scarcely researched. We therefore investigate: To what extent and do political parties use local appeals? We examine this in the 2023 Dutch elections, a most-likely case for finding local appeals, as the centre-periphery divide was a salient issue, instigated by farmer protests and several new political parties claiming to represent regional interests. Moreover, the variety of parties in the Dutch political landscape allows for mapping a diversity of local appeals. Our study takes a two-step approach. First, we conceptualise and operationalise local appeals through a qualitative content analysis of eight party manifestos. Local appeals are regarded as a group appeal: a party electoral strategy to tap into people’s social identity (Thau, 2019). Local appeals are textual or verbal elements that make place identity salient, and that link the political party to that identity. Taking an iterative approach, social identity and local governance literature prove to be valuable lenses for looking at the empirical material. The result is a typology of four local appeals: 1) simple mentions of places or place names; 2) appeals to place-based groups; 3) appeals to geographical distributive issues; 4) appeals to decentralisation to subnational governments. Second, we conduct a quantitative content analysis of the same materials (N = 5141 paragraphs). The use of local appeals ranges from 14% to 31%. In line with our hypothesis, the populist agrarian right Farmer-Citizen Movement uses significantly more local appeals than many other parties. In contrast to our second hypothesis, the populist radical right Freedom Party does not use more local appeals than other parties. This is surprising, as scholars have argued that radical right populists are likely to employ a localist narrative (e.g. Chou et al., 2022). In addition, we find that green-socialist party Groenlinks-PvdA uses significantly more decentralisation appeals. Thus, parties appear to take different routes to tap into the local. Our contributions are twofold. We develop a novel concept of local appeals that can be used to investigate how (perceived) regional disparity is addressed in the national realm. Moreover, we test the concept as an empirical instrument in a single case. The findings suggest that the connection between the populist radical right party type and local appeals is more nuanced than suggested by earlier studies. We pose that this relationship depends on the presence of other party types, such as agrarian or regionalist parties, which should be tested in future comparative research.