Representation Beyond Issues: How Parties Strategically Combine Group and Policy Appeals

A large body of extant research has examined how parties use both policy appeals and group appeals to increase electoral support among different groups in society. Yet, most of this work has occurred in parallel, and few scholars have investigated how parties strategically combine these two types of appeals – namely, what policies are promised to which groups and to what effect. This article advances this area of research by introducing a new dataset on parties’ policy and group appeals based on party manifesto data in Europe. We capture three key elements of group appeals: the group being appealed to, the policy promise being made (if any), and the specificity of the promise. We argue that whether groups receive symbolic gestures versus concrete policy commitments has profound implications for the quality and credibility of their representation. Using this data, we therefore test the extent to which different parties pair group appeals with substantive policy commitments and identify systematic patterns in how different policy areas become linked to particular groups. By distinguishing which groups receive symbolic versus substantive representation and in which policy domains, we bridge the emerging research on group appeals with foundational theories of representation. Our analysis also reveals under which circumstances certain groups are made politically absent through their omission from parties’ policy appeals.