Two key conflict dimensions structure the European policy space: a socio-economic and a socio-cultural dimension. Despite myriad research locating parties in this space, we know relatively about voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy positions: how do voters form perceptions of party policy positions on the economic and socio-cultural issue dimension? Such a task is a difficult one for voters, as they need to arrive at a summary judgment concerning a higher-level dimension based on information on specific issues. Moreover, parties tend to have quite different positions on the individual issues attributed to both dimensions. For example, they may be in favour of gay marriage but oppose a liberal immigration regime; in this case, where should the party be placed on a liberal-authoritarian dimension? One aid to voters could be the emphasis parties put on each issue, so whether they talk more about their stance on gay marriage or that on immigration. In this paper, we therefore test whether the emphasis a party places on a topic matters for how voters perceive party positions on higher-level dimensions. Using two survey experiments (n=3.000), we present respondents with short and long statements on two issues and examine whether the length of statements affects positional perceptions for the socio-cultural and for the economic dimension, even if the policy stance of the statement is the same. The empirical results show support for our hypotheses and have important implications for party competition and political representation.