Parties’ electoral strategies in a two-dimensional political space

Abstract

This article has two objectives. Firstly, we test the theoretical assumptions about the repertoire of party strategies in a two-dimensional political space presented in the introduction to this special issue. We use a new dataset that content-analyzes electoral parties’ manifestos for regional elections in Spain and Great Britain (the Regional Manifestos Project) in order to see how well the theoretically-derived strategies approximate what parties in regional elections really do. Secondly, we develop tentative explanations of parties’ strategies: Which parties are more likely to use what type of strategy and under what circumstances? After running a multinomial logistic model we find that, in contrast to the niche party thesis, regionalist parties strategize simultaneously along the territorial and the economic dimensions of competition, while state-wide parties react to the presence of regionalist opponents by incorporating the territorial dimension into the agenda.