Parties' issue strategies on the drawing board
- Author(s)
- Carolina Plescia, Sylvia Kritzinger, Patricia Oberluggauer
- Abstract
Parties may rely on different issue agendas when tailoring their electoral campaigns in an attempt to win elections. This paper compares two key party issue strategies to examine which one the victorious Austrian Peoples’ Party (ÖVP) relied on the most during the 2017 Austrian election campaign vis-à-vis its main competitors. These two key party strategies are the ‘riding-the-wave’ model, which posits that parties focus on issues that currently concern voters the most and the recent ‘issue-yield model’, which instead suggests that parties adopt strategic behaviour targeting all those issues with genuine opportunities for electoral expansion. It is found that, compared to the other main parties in the 2017 Austrian election campaign, the ÖVP was the one most clearly relying on the issue-yield approach. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigns, party’s exploitation of issue strategies, and voter representation beyond the Austrian case.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- Journal
- West European Politics
- Volume
- 43
- Pages
- 639-664
- No. of pages
- 26
- ISSN
- 0140-2382
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2019.1655965
- Publication date
- 2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506012 Political systems
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/parties-issue-strategies-on-the-drawing-board(3da141f0-6a01-409d-aaff-009887b0bad2).html