Who counts as a niche party? Programmatic distinctiveness and local party competition

The concept of niche parties is central to research on party competition, yet niche status is often treated as a fixed party characteristic and measured using predefined issue categories. This article conceptualizes party nicheness as a continuous, relational property and measures it inductively from party manifestos. Analysing 115 municipal and county-level manifestos from the 2019 Norwegian local and regional elections, we focus on the anti-road toll party Folkeaksjonen nei til mer bompenger (FNB). Using structural topic modeling, we calculate locality-specific nicheness scores as the distance between a party’s issue-emphasis profile and the mean profile of its competitors in the same electoral context. FNB was, on average, the most programmatically distinctive party, but it was not consistently the most distinctive across contexts. Parties conventionally classified as mainstream also had more distinctive issue-emphasis profiles in particular contexts. The findings show that party nicheness varies across competitive environments and highlight the value of analysing party competition at the subnational level.