11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Sarah Wagner
Discussant/s:
Paul Cornelius Bauer
Meeting Room J

Leo Azzollini
The Scar Effects of Unemployment on Electoral Participation: Withdrawal and Mobilisation across European Societies

Sarah Wagner
Ambiguity as Strategy of Radical Left Party Leaders in Western Europe

Giovanni Angioni
Populist Swing: How Italy’s politicians are exploiting inequality rhetoric in their communication strategy

Stefan Müller, Sven-Oliver Proksch
Causes and Electoral Effects of Nostalgic Rhetoric: A Cross-National Analysis of Party Communication

Nelson Santos
Explaining the politicization of EU: Parties and media agendas across time and space
Ambiguity as Strategy of Radical Left Party Leaders in Western Europe
Sarah Wagner
University of Essex

Leaders of parties are often used as ideological cues by other parties, scholars and voters to understand where a party stands on a policy issue. However, some parties choose to avoid being clear on certain issues. For instance, Radical Left Parties (RLPs) have a contentious relationship with nationalist issues - strategically ambiguous positioning is prominent. Do the leaders give a clearer indication on salient and contentious issues in RLPs? This research uses the author's original dataset of RLP party congress speeches in 14 Western European countries from their earliest election in the 1980s to their latest election before 2019. Through the use of text as data, specifically Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS) and dictionary analysis, this research estimates ambiguity in speech. Further, this research classifies policy areas in order to show the issues in which ambiguity is more prominent. The research finds that there are significant differences in positional ambiguity between the leadership in comparison to less prominent members on issues such as Euroscepticism. When salience of policy issues like the EU and immigration increases, party manifestos become more ambiguous, due to enhanced intra-party heterogeneity, while party leaders do not show the same trends. The strategic ambiguity of RLP leadership varies depending on a party's position in the party system and thus differs within the RLP family. This research is a first step in the study of strategic communication in RLPs as it provides a quantitative analysis of party leadership strategy on specific issues.