Choosing Your Battles Wisely? Activist Preferences, Party Size and Issue Selection

This paper seeks to explain why parties emphasize particular positional issues in their campaigns -- a hitherto understudied topic. The policy preferences of activists are shown to be an important influence on party platforms, and therefore, party emphasis decisions on positional issues. However, I find party size to be a more important determinant of parties' emphasis strategies than whether a party is 'mainstream' or 'niche'. Large mainstream parties -- termed 'dominant parties' -- de-emphasize issues on which their activists are relatively extreme, whereas both small mainstream and small niche parties -- 'non-dominant parties' -- emphasize issues on which their activists are relatively extreme. Further, large niche parties appear to behave more like large mainstream parties than small niche parties in this respect. These patterns hold across Western and Eastern Europe, suggesting that, in a variety of information environments, the appearance of policy moderation may be viewed as advantageous by dominant parties, and potentially disadvantageous by nondominant parties. However, the incentive to emphasize moderate issue positions appears to be stronger for dominant parties in less proportional systems than similar parties in more proportional ones. These analyses have implications for the responsiveness of party platforms to voter preferences.