ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 focuses on supply-side factors, analysing the effect of parties’ position on policy issues, engagement in issue entrepreneurship, incumbency status (and that of their main competitors), and internal party conflict (as an indicator of organizational strength and political consistency). The chapter demonstrates the relevance of RLPs’ behaviour for understanding their electoral support. The results show that the electoral returns of RLPs’ political moderation depend on the dimension of political conflict. RLPs tend to be more successful when they adopt a moderate position on economic issues. However, their stance on sociocultural issues does not necessarily have an impact on their electoral support. RLPs benefit from adopting libertarian policy positions and a certain degree of Euroscepticism, but only when these issues occupy a central space in their discourse. This is because emphasizing their position on such issues enables RLPs to engage in a policy differentiation strategy that sets them apart from other competitors. Additionally, the chapter shows that incumbency tends to be associated with lower support for RLPs and that there is no strong evidence indicating that highly conflictual RLPs perform differently to those in which internal conflict is lower.
