The personification of politics - Parties strategic choice between group and issue appeals

Parties' use of group appeals has and is attracting extant scholarly attention. However, research still lacks a clear understanding of when parties appeal to groups rather than referring to more abstract concepts such as policies and issues. I address this research gap by building a theoretical model that makes the case that it is a strategic choice to either use abstract concepts or group appeals. Either referring to groups or to concepts serves as a mean to manage the politicization of specific issues. I test my theoretical model with a text-as-data approach, measuring the use of group mentions compared to abstract concepts. I use this measure of personification to examine how British, German, and Austrian parties speak about unemployment and immigration in parliament between 1984 to 2022. This study has important implications for the study of the strategic use of political rhetoric and for the representation of vulnerable groups in politics.