Issue Yield and Party Strategy in Multiparty Competition

The issue yield model introduced a theory of the herestethic use of policy issues as strategic resources in multidimensional party competition. We extend the model by systematically addressing the specificities of issue yield dynamics in multiparty systems, with special regard to parties’ issue yield rankings (relative position) and issue yield heterogeneity (differentiation) on each issue. Second, we introduce a novel research design for original data collection that allows for a more systematic testing of the model, by featuring (a) a large number of policy issues, (b) the use of Twitter content for coding parties’ issue emphasis, and (c) an appropriate time sequence for measuring issue yield configurations and issue emphasis. We finally present findings from a pilot implementation of such design, performed on the occasion of the 2014 European Parliament election in Italy. Findings confirm the soundness of the design and provide support for the newly introduced hypotheses about multiparty competition.