The Role of Competitive Advantage in Party Competition

This article transfers the concept of competitive advantage from management theory to party competition. Competitive advantage as a party's ability to sustainably outrival any competitor in a given voter segment involves not only a superior appeal in that segment but also a resource or efficiency dimension. The effort involved in achieving distinctiveness and increasing one's attractiveness on an issue means that a party's competitive advantage is hard to challenge by its competitors. Investing in certain issues and attacking parties on “their” issues is therefore only promising under certain conditions. Whether a competitive advantage can be gained or sustained and whether a party can be challenged depends on the larger competitive situation, which is characterized by five kinds of influences: potential new competitors, existence of substitutes, voter influence, ideational suppliers, and intensity of rivalry. Together, these forces mark competitive pressures that are key to understanding parties’ issue portfolio and policy changes.