Issue Entrepreneurship

This chapter evaluates issue entrepreneurship, an innovation strategy through which political parties mobilize a new or previously ignored issue. Political parties will engage in issue entrepreneurship when the electoral gains of doing so outweigh the costs. Challenger parties are more likely to act as issue entrepreneurs than dominant parties because the potential costs relating to possible bad reactions of the voter base or coalition partners are likely to be lower for the former. At the same time, the potential electoral gains are more uncertain for dominant parties than for challenger parties. Parties that wish to politically innovate by mobilizing new or previously ignored policy issues are likely to choose issues with a high degree of appropriability—that is to say, issues that are not easily subsumed in the dominant left-right dimension. These issues may drive a wedge in the constituencies of dominant parties and lead to internal rifts.