Supply-side dynamics of parties’ group appeals: How dominance affects the choice between symbolic and policy-based appeals

Social group appeals are a crucial but often overlooked aspect of party competition. Challenger parties differ from dominant parties not only in their issue entrepreneurship and anti-establishment rhetoric, but also in how they approach social groups. Whereas dominant parties can and must use their policy record when appealing to groups rhetorically, challenger parties compensate for their lack of policy influence and long-lasting group ties by using more symbolic group-based appeals, creating affective affiliations with voters while avoiding accountability or dividing their potential base. Similarly, they are more inclined to use negative group-based appeals. Using a most-similar-systems design and a new dataset of 15,460 tweets from German subnational parties, our main finding is that dominant parties, particularly those having held the prime minister’s office, favour policy-based group appeals, while challengers rely more on symbolic appeals. However, differences in appeal strategies diminish during campaign times. Our findings underline the importance of group-based appeals for mainstream-challenger competition.