EMPHASIZING THE OPPONENTS' ISSUES. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS ON THE INCENTIVES AND OUTCOMES OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN EUROPE

The aim of the thesis is to advance a deeper understanding of the incentives and electoral outcomes of a specific party strategy: the emphasis of issues that not only fall outside the party’s ideological domain but that lie within the opponents’ one. The existing approaches on the matter have focused on the convergence of parties on the same issues while the specific choice to emphasize issues ideologically distinctive of the opponents remained underexplored, a gap this thesis addresses. Also, existing studies mostly focus on the American context or a limited set of European Countries while the present research aims at conducting a broad comparative analysis of European democracies. The research questions focus on parties’ incentives, from a spatial point of view as well as from a more strategic one, and the electoral outcomes of the strategy. The thesis sheds light on this specific behaviour to foster a deeper understanding of the daring choice to step foot in the opponents’ field. To this end, the study employs a methodology that combines a quantitative approach, through the empirical analysis performed with longitudinal multivariate regression models, and a qualitative approach, through analytical narrative and a game-theoretic model, to further examine the strategic dynamic in which parties act. The key findings show that left-wing and right-wing parties are guided by different incentives, as if they act in a perfectly asymmetrical way. They employ the same bold strategy to emphasize an issue ideologically distinctive of their opponents while following completely different incentives, showing the importance of the ideological standpoint from which they make their decisions. Furthermore, the study shows the conditions that make the strategy feasible, highlighting the interconnected behaviour of parties that act and react to one another according to the incentives and cost they have to consider. Thus, the study contributes to our understanding of party strategy by focusing on a specific choice that occurs in real-world settings and that has implications for the democracies we live in.