The 2017 Dutch general election: how small parties campaigned more strategically

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue yield theory. We investigate whether parties strategically emphasize high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, we ask whether parties strategically emphasized issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, we find that voters and parties show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasize mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilizing strategy, and that most parties emphasize high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won considerably behaved strategically while the social democrats –- who severely lost– hardly did. Our findings imply that the issue yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.