Party strategies: Valence versus position

This chapter reviews theories and empirical implications of party strategies. We begin with a review of parties’ positional strategies, building on Downs’s (1957) seminal work and the developments of his spatial model of party competition. Positional strategies are policies that parties advocate along a continuum of voters’ preferences. We discuss party strategies in single- and multi-dimensional party competition, and two- and multi-party elections. We then survey a second type of party strategies. We examine Stokes’s (1963) valence model of party competition which postulates that voting is based on attributes of parties of which all voters approve, such as competence, integrity and party unity. Combining these models, we discuss methodological problems in the study of valence politics, the effect of parties’ valence image on their positional strategies, and parties’ choice between emphasising their valence image and policy positions.