%0 Journal Article
%T How Political Parties Use Group
%A Mads Thau
%J Political Studies
%@ 1467-9248
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0032321717744495
%X Political parties often appeal to groups. Yet, existing work does not consider how such group-based appeals are used, presumably because they are thought to have grown ineffective. Contrary to this, I argue that group-based appeals are central to party electoral strategy, and that time has only strengthened the incentive to use them. Using original data on 10,000 group-based appeals found in sentence-by-sentence coding of British election manifestos, I demonstrate an increasing use of group-based appeals from 1964 to 2015. Furthermore, I show that the range of groups emphasized, the concentration of group emphasis, and the specific group categories targeted also follow the electoral incentives prevalent over this 50-year period. These findings shed new light on how political parties appeal for votes and suggest that we view group-based appeals as a distinctive feature of party electoral strategy. I discuss the implications for our broader understanding of electoral competition
%K party electoral strategy
%K group-based appeals
%K social identity
%K election manifestos
%K Britain
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0032321717744495