FINEGOLD, Kenneth <br/><br/>
Whar works? competitive strategies of major parties out of power 

 -  2001 
<br/><br/> What should major parties out of power do to win elections? To answer that question, we need to understand what these parties do to recapture political ascendancy and whether their actual  vehaviour differs from their optimal behaviour. In this article, we propose a systematic, replicable mehtod of identify the competitive strategies that American parties out or power have adopted in their pursuit of the presidency. We present a taxonomuy of party strategies, which we  operationalize by comparison of utility functions for hipothetical voters. Using both directional  and proximity models of issue voting, we compute these utility function for each presidential election from 1852 to 1996, controlling for variable that systematically affect voting, including economic conditions and incumbency. These results suggest that, contrary to the views of many political scientists and party activists, there is no single optimal strategy through which parties out of power can regain it, Rather, several competitive strategies offer similar prospects for electoral success