Social group identities play an important role in structuring voters’ political behaviour. Recognising this, political parties strategically reference these identities in their communications to shape voters' perceptions of parties and candidates. Yet we know little about how inter-party competition and public debate affect the dynamics of group references in party communication. Viewing parties' group references through the lens of issue competition and issue convergence, we hypothesise that parties respond to each other's salient group references. Social groups, however, are not only debated by political parties, but also discussed in public more broadly, and especially in news media. From the perspective of agenda-setting research, we therefore also expect parties to respond to the salience of social groups in media reporting.
To study this, we apply automated text analysis to press releases from major political parties in Austria and the United Kingdom and of major newspapers reporting for the period 2010-2020. By using Vector Autoregression models and impulse response functions, we quantify how a party’s group-appeals are influenced by other parties’ communication and media reporting. Contrary to expectations, we find little responsiveness of political parties to either source, with little interaction in the group agendas of parties vis-à-vis each other and the media. Instead, parties are more likely to prioritise group appeals which they ‘own’, regardless of their salience in the wider communication environment. These results have implications for our understanding of party competition, group appeals as strategic communication and the broader dynamics of public debates over social identities.