Electoral campaign effects: An aggregate analysis of electoral issue competition

Elections are not only verdicts on incumbents but also contests over the issues that parties emphasize. This paper asks whether parties’ issue-specific campaign strategies influence their electoral success, and how parties decide on those strategies. We leverage a new dataset on parties’ electoral campaign efforts in 15 European countries to examine three dimensions of campaign strategy: the salience of issues, the position they take on those issues, and the extremity or moderation of those positions. As for the parties’ strategic choices, the results confirm that European parties organize their issue-specific campaigns largely in line with their ideological positions and their status as challengers or mainstream parties. In response to the electoral effect of their campaign strategies, the results confirm the received wisdom that the parties’ issue-specific campaigns have only a limited effect on the electoral outcome. However, this general result has to be nuanced by party family: challengers and mainstream party families have benefited to varying degrees from their respective strategies. The effects of campaigns on electoral success are the largest for the radical right, which has benefited from putting the emphasis on cultural issues and taking clear-cut or even extreme positions on economic issues. Our findings shed new light on party responsiveness and the limits of political persuasion, showing when campaign appeals can sway voters and when structural factors trump campaign effects.