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

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.