Ambiguity in the Campaign, and in Office: How Parties’ Ambiguous Policy Statements Affect Party Support

Abstract Recent work investigates the electoral impact of parties’ ambiguous policy statements, but we lack insight in how different forms of ambiguous statements affect voters’ party evaluations. Moreover, research assumes that ambiguity inoculates parties from backlash once they take up office, but no evidence to date tests this assumption. We study how parties’ ambiguous policy statements, in the form of vagueness and inconsistency, affect voters’ party evaluations, and whether voters update their party evaluations once a party takes a clear policy decision when in office. We find that inconsistent policy statements result in more negative party evaluations. Vague statements only benefit the party if it has a position that mismatches that of the voter. When the party takes up office and must take a clear policy decision, voters update their party evaluation depending on the match between the party’s policy decision and the voter’s position: voters’ evaluations after seeing the decision increase slightly compared to their earlier evaluation if the decision aligns with the voter’s position, but decrease when the decision runs counter to the position. Importantly, neither vagueness nor inconsistency in the party’s earlier policy statement inoculate the party against this decreased evaluation.