Exploring the connection between social group appeals and party policy positions

An extensive literature shows that political parties use various types of appeals to gain electoral support from their constituents. Social group appeals are one such form of political communication used by parties to reach out to their target audiences. In recent years, the use of social group appeals in parties’ campaign communication has been a topic of renewed scholarly interest. Despite this growing attention to the role of social groups in party competition, we still have only a limited understanding of how parties use these appeals to maximize their electoral support. This paper seeks to address the important question of how political parties use social group appeals to communicate their policy positions. We draw upon the literature on cleavages, policy positions, and social group appeals to generate theoretical expectations on the combination of group appeals and policy positions. The literature on cleavages examines how social divisions, for example, based on socioeconomic classes, residence, religion, and ethnicity, divide voters and shape political preferences. Other studies based on spatial models of party competition emphasize the importance of party policy positions for generating voter support. The literature on social group appeals, in turn, argues that parties appeal to distinct social groups in order to gain the support of specific segments of the electorate. Based on these studies, we propose that parties can use positive and negative appeals to distinct social groups to generate support for their positions on different policy dimensions. More specifically, we hypothesize that parties’ incentives to use group appeals as a means to emphasize and strengthen their policy positions are influenced by five factors: i) the extremeness of their position on a particular policy dimension, ii) the position of other parties, iii) the electoral competitiveness of an election, iv) a party’s position shift from the last election, and v) the respective party type (mainstream vs. niche). To test these theoretical expectations empirically, the paper relies on quantitative content analysis data of Austrian party manifestos between 1990 and 2019 provided by the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). These data contain information on parties’ policy stances on different issues as well as their (positive and negative) appeals to different social groups. Based on these data we scale parties’ policy positions for multiple combinations of social groups and policy issues. The empirical results indicate that parties make extensive use of positive and negative appeals to distinct social groups in order to communicate their policy positions and generate electoral support. This analysis provides an important contribution to the literature on party competition, as it enables us to better understand how parties combine different types of electoral appeals in their campaign rhetoric. The findings also demonstrate the importance of social group appeals and therefore have important implications for the study of political communication.