Promising links: how parties combine policy issues with group appeals

Abstract

Despite growing interest in how parties use social group appeals to reach out to different groups within society, the combination of policy issues and social groups in parties’ campaign strategies remains poorly understood. Building on existing theories of issue competition, this study develops and tests new hypotheses about the relationship between policy appeals and group appeals. It proposes that the use of group appeals in policy communication depends on parties’ perceived issue competence and the public salience of the issue. It is hypothesised that parties frequently employ appeals to social groups to improve the communication about their owned issues and about issues that are important to voters. However, if their best issues lack public salience, parties will link them with appeals to related groups to increase their relevance. Conversely, when parties lack competence for salient issues, they will try to reframe these weaker issues using appeals to unrelated groups. These expectations are tested by combining new data on issue emphasis and social group appeals from election manifestos (1990–2019) with public opinion data on public issue salience and perceived party competence in Austria. The results confirm that group appeals in party communication about policy issues are shaped by issue salience and competence perceptions. These findings have key implications for our understanding of issue competition and voter representation.

Keywords:

• Social groups
• group appeals
• political communication
• party competition

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this manuscript have been presented at 2021 conference by the Austrian Political Science Association, the EPSA annual conference 2022 in Prague, and the ECPR Joint Sessions 2023 in Toulouse. We would like to thank all participants for their valuable feedback. We are also very grateful for the helpful suggestions by Thomas M. Meyer, Wolfgang C. Müller, Markus Wagner, and by the three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Importantly, the following expectations refer to mainstream as well as niche parties, but not to sectoral parties, whose main motivation is to appeal to a very distinct group constituency.

2 The Greens lost parliamentary representation after the 2017 elections as they fell below the 4% threshold, yet they immediately reentered the Nationalrat after the subsequent election in 2019. The remaining parties were permanently represented in parliament.

3 The coding instructions and multiple examples of the coding are provided in the Online Appendix.

4 Following Green-Pedersen and Mortensen (2015: 752), we calculate the party system agenda as the average issue attention of all other parties in a given election.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lena Maria Huber

Lena Maria Huber is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. Her research interests include party competition, political communication, political attitudes and behaviour, and representation. Her articles have appeared in journals such as The Journal of Politics, Political Communication and the European Journal of Political Research. [[email protected]]

Martin Haselmayer

Martin Haselmayer is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna (Department of Government) and an associated Postdoctoral Researcher in the Varieties of Egalitarianism project at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on political communication, elections, and inequality. His work has been published in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research and Political Communication. [[email protected]]