The strategies of party competition: a typology

This chapter provides a typology of different strategies of party competition, which, inspired by Bonnie Meguid’s work, are defined as dismissive, adversarial and accommodative. It achieves two objectives. First, it aims to facilitate the work of our contributors in Part II of the volume, as they assess how parties (populists or not, newer or more seasoned) relate to one another in different contexts, hence ultimately making it possible for the editors to compare different case studies. Second, it provides a theoretical contribution to the discussion of party competition more generally. We argue that our typology contains several elements of novelty. It can be applied to interactions between all parties, and at different territorial levels of political competition, including local, regional, national and possibly supranational electoral arenas. Moreover, it develops Meguid's categorization by including subcategories, which better capture specific competition strategies. Finally, the strategies identified here can be used both as explanandum and explanans, that is, as dependent and independent variables. Hence hypotheses can be developed to explain why some parties tend to adopt certain strategies when engaging with others.