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The issue positions of political actors are often ambiguous, resulting in uncertainty on the part of voters. Such ambiguity constitutes a challenge to representation, as it prevents voters from getting a clear understanding of parties' positions. Ironically, despite growing interest in the concept, the concept itself is remarkably ambiguous: different studies use different conceptualisations of ambiguity, which hampers theory integration. This paper proposes a three-dimensional conceptualization of ambiguity: party positions are ambiguous to the extent that parties deemphasize them, remain vague or are inconsistent on them. A review of 103 studies establishes the prevalence of these three dimensions in the literature, shows that most studies focus on a single dimension, and reveals lacunae in the current research on ambiguity. Based on the three-dimensional conceptualisation, the paper then develops a preliminary framework on the causes of ambiguity, outlines key gaps in the literature and suggests promising avenues of theory development.

Nonnational elections are at least partially determined by factors pertaining to the national level, which is problematic for the democratic functioning of these nonnational policy levels. Recent scholarly work has begun examining the impact of the election campaign on voters' tendency to vote "nationally". However, these studies focus almost exclusively on European Union (EU) elections, and their findings may not be generalizable to other contexts. Moreover, they assume campaigns affect all voters similarly. In contrast, this study examines whether campaigns affect voters' tendency to vote nationally in a local election, and whether partisan preferences condition the effect. These expectations are tested using panel survey data and a media content analysis collected during the 2012 Antwerp local election campaign. The results indicate that the campaign affected voters, making local considerations more important. However, the impact was conditional upon voters' partisan preferences: When a party put more emphasis on the national context, voters preferring that party became more likely to rely on national considerations throughout the campaign.

This study examines how statement selection systematically affects the output of voting advice applications (VAAs). Does the statement selection influence how often voters are matched with parties that 'should be' close to them? Our benchmark is a classic account of issue voting, the proximity left-right model. We analyze the Belgian VAA Do the Vote Test and find that the output resembles the left-right model. When more left-right statements are included, more left-wing voters get the advice to vote for left-wing parties and the same is true on the right, while simultaneously advantaging parties with more extreme positions on this dimension. We also analyze issue saliency and find that parties are disadvantaged when more statements about salient issues are included. These findings imply tough choices for VAA builders. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

In the run up to the elections, parties have several ways of communicating with voters. In this article, we focus on one piece of the puzzle: advertisements of political parties in the mass media. More specifically, we are interested in the choice of candidates within these advertisements. In countries where parties are the dominant actor, they are faced with a choice: not all candidates can be promoted in the campaign, as this would be too costly and inefficient. Thus, the first question we want to answer is which factors determine candidate choice in political advertisements? Secondly, does candidate choice in political advertisements have an effect on the subsequent coverage in media as well? Agenda setting research has shown that as far as issues are concerned, advertisements do set the media agenda. We use a content analysis of seven magazines and newspapers that was collected in the run up to the 2009 regional elections in Flanders, the largest region of Belgium. The results indicate that both internal party hierarchy, as well as external visibility of candidates determines candidate choice in political advertisements. Furthermore, the agenda setting effect of political advertisements is confirmed as well.