The paradox of positional convergence: how political parties use a commitment strategy to stand out from competitors

Political parties often take similar stances to appeal to the same large voter segments. Yet, when parties converge, they paradoxically risk losing votes if the electorate cannot distinguish one party from the other. To deal with this paradox of positional convergence, I propose that vote-seeking parties follow a policy-committing strategy. By producing commitments, a party increases the costs of deviating from its position after the election, making the standpoint more credible to voters in the election campaign. Parties can thus exploit the policy-committing strategy to stand out from parties with similar positions. After building a new dataset of more than 1 million machine-coded quasi-sentences from parties’ election manifestoes covering 32 Western democracies, I show that parties make more policy commitments the closer they are to other parties’ positions, supporting my main hypothesis. A major implication of this finding is that intense party competition is crucial for the translation of policy positions into real policies.