Protest and opposition parties’ election strategies

Political parties use heuristics or “cognitive shortcuts” to adopt election policies under conditions of uncertainty. We contend that protest against the government can be another form of such heuristics, which opposition parties employ. When incumbents face high levels of demonstrations, opposition parties have incentives to distance their policies from them. Empirically, this “protest distancing” effect is supported by two-way fixed-effects models, a selection estimator, and matching analyses of opposition parties' programmatic policy positions across 24 European democracies between 2000 and 2015. The findings advance our understanding of parties’ election strategies and the implications of political protest.