Do voters prefer clear party positions over ambiguous ones? A survey experiment investigating the impact of inconsistent and vague positions on party evaluations

Party ambiguity is the extent to which parties avoid taking clear issue positions. Recent work investigates how voters react to various manifestations of ambiguity, with most attention going to strategies of vagueness—speaking only in generalities that lack precision—and inconsistency—giving inconsistent cues about the party position. Yet, research has only recently begun to recognize the multidimensionality of ambiguity, let alone investigate its heterogeneous effects on citizens’ party evaluations. Moreover, the vast majority of studies consider the electoral role of ambiguity, but do not consider how ambiguity during the campaign affects a party’s fate once it takes up office and needs to make clear policy choices. So, this study seeks to tackle two questions: first, how do vague and/or inconsistent party positions affect voters’ evaluations of these parties? Second, do voters update their party evaluations once a party has to clarify its position when in office? We present data from a novel survey experiment in which respondents were asked to evaluate parties whose issue positions have systematically varying levels of inconsistency and vagueness, on three different issues (nuclear power, social housing and the economy). In line with expectations, we find that inconsistent positions result in more negative party evaluations, whereas the impact of vagueness is contingent on the position match between the voter and party: if the position of the voter and party match, precision benefits the party, as vaguer positions get less positive party evaluations. In contrast, if the position of the voter and party do not match, increased precision causes party evaluations to plummet. When we consider what happens when parties take a policy decision, the results only confirm part of our expectations, largely due to the general pattern whereby voters negatively update their party evaluations when parties take decisions. As a result, ambiguity may somewhat dampen the negative updating, but still results in negative shifts in party evaluations.