Broad Appeal Strategies, Perceptual Disagreements and the Representativeness of Party Democracy in Europe.

This project seeks to enhance understandings of how parties' supporters inform parties' electoral strategies and what effect these strategies have on voter perceptions and representation. To realise office, parties pursue specific strategies to appeal broadly to the electorate. While studies of party strategy focus on the issues parties compete on and their historical reputations, few studies consider how differences in the goals of parties' supporters might impact the strategies they implement. I predict that parties with a more ideologically diverse support benefit from the scope of positions and emphasis they can afford to specific issues. In pursuing broadly appealing strategies, parties aim to appear ideologically closer to different groups of voters. Consequently, parties that are enabled to adopt certain strategies through the ideological diversity of their support should, in turn, attract more ideologically diverse supporters over time. To test the validity of these predictions, I will analyse parties' manifestos to measure forms of electoral strategy. I will further examine party conference speeches to understand better how intra-party democracy influences policy and contributes to diversifying parties' ideological appeal. Using survey data, I will examine whether the ideological diversity of parties' supporters constrains or enables parties to engage in specific electoral strategies, and how effective these strategies are in influencing voters' perceptions of parties. As this research is critical for understanding representation and policy outcomes, I will also assess whether perceptual disagreements among voters on parties' positions have contributed to a decline in the representativeness of party democracy.