The Role of Issue Salience and Competitive Advantages in Spatial Models of Political Competition

The empirical evidence within the field of party competition suggests that the success of far-right parties is tightly connected to issue salience of immigration policies. However, it is still unclear how other factors of the pattern of competition shape that relation. We contribute to this literature by taking a spatial viewpoint and analyzing the moderating role of the party configuration in a two-dimensional space. We focus on various characteristics of the party configuration that together describe a competitive advantage. We also extend the analysis to green parties. Based on simulations, we hypothesize that far-right and green parties benefit stronger from increasing issue salience if they take a moderate position on both their core issue and the economic dimension and if the distance to the next competitor on their core issue is large. Empirical analyses of far-right and green parties’ success in Western European countries support our hypotheses.