A Question of Commitment: Analyzing Parties’ Strategies when Engaging with Competition in a Multidimensional Issue Space

Political parties occasionally take up and adapt to new political issues outside their comfort zone, e.g. when nativism or environmental issues rise in salience, and remain rather steadfast and true to their core ideology at other times. Prioritizing one over the other oftentimes creates intra-party tensions, reflecting the fact that parties are conservative organizations with limited capacities to fundamentally alter their policy positions, yet also cannot disengage altogether from current political debates. I argue in this paper that current theories that assume a false dichotomy of ‘countering’ and ‘accommodation’ are ill-equipped to account for oftentimes more nuanced strategies of parties in multidimensional issue competition. Rather than studying if parties engage with competition, this paper is concerned with the question how they do so. To this end, this paper proposes a novel theoretical argument: to pre-empt backlashes resulting from accommodating a whole range of policy positions or policy packages, parties have an incentive to employ a strategy (a) that seeks to transform their rivals’ claims into new policies more easily reconcilable with their previously held positions yet still following similar ideological lines (‘policy or frame adaption’), and/or (b) that is to parrot policy positions or frames where it is less costly, namely in areas that are not at their ideological core but their periphery and therefore of lesser concern to their constituents (‘selective policy or frame adoption’). The paper is structured as follows: part one revisits the nativist challenge Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRP) pose to party competition and democracy, which is the core focus of this paper. Part two introduces the aforementioned analytical framework, compares it to existing approaches, and discusses empirical expectations that follow from it. Part three provides a brief empirical analysis of key assumptions regarding the ideological ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ of party families and their use in party competition, comparing the (permeating) impact of nativism to the (less permeating) impact of environmentalism by drawing on a novel party-level (e.g. MARPOR) and voter-level (EES) dataset that comprises 27 countries across Europe. Lastly, part four discusses the presented framework and early findings in light of future avenues for research of party competition.