Ethno-Regional Parties Cannot Be Everything to Everyone: Electoral Risks of a More Diverse Issue Agenda

2025/07/10 by Matthew E. Bergman, Firat Efe · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Social Policy and Reform Studies

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/17449057.2025.2521583

openalex publication_date 2025/07/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Abstract

This note suggests that should ethno-regional parties broaden their agenda, they could be electorally punished. Literature suggests an electoral incentive to a broader party issue agenda, even for some ‘niche’ parties. However as quintessential ‘niche’ parties due to their limited ability to be competitive with the general electorate, we argue ethno-regional parties can only gain votes by specializing on a narrow, concentrated set of issues. They will have limited success when engaging in broad or diverse issue competition with mainstream issues. Using over 40 years of electoral data from eight advanced capitalist democracies, our main empirical finding is that, as Ethno-regional parties broaden or diversify their issue agenda they are likely to lose subsequent vote share.

Citations

• Ethnic outbidding and nested competition: Explaining the extremism of ethnonational minority parties in Europe
• “Effective” Number of Parties
• What To Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data
• An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy
• Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success
• The Associative Dimension of Issue Ownership
• A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context
• Issue Diversification: Which Niche Parties Can Succeed Electorally by Broadening Their Agenda?
• Adaptation or inflexibility? Niche party responsiveness to policy competition, with evidence from regionalist parties
• Scaling Policy Preferences from Coded Political Texts
• Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses

Discussions

• Finishing the issue diversification trilogy (center-right and nationalist parties can gain from a more diverse issue agenda; green and center-left cannot) 4 years later; Opposite effect for Ethno-Regi [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]