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

A central theme in the party-competition literature holds that parties often obscure their positions to avoid electoral risk. Policy mixing—addressing multiple policy issues concurrently—would therefore commonly be interpreted as a deliberate 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 core domains, mixing serves to integrate auxiliary issues into a causal narrative tied to the party’s primary agenda (e.g., a green party linking climate policy to infrastructure). In this context, mixing signals competence and highlights the cross-cutting relevance of the party’s main issue. By contrast, mixing in peripheral domains fulfills a blurring function, allowing parties to conceal their true positions to manage internal conflict and broaden their appeal. Policy mixing is therefore not a unitary communicative act; its electoral and democratic implications vary by policy area. To distinguish these mechanisms and assess their prevalence, we analyze election manifestos and parliamentary speeches across multiple party systems and introduce a novel LLM-based measure of policy mixing in political text.