Mobilizing versus chasing: how do parties target voters in election campaigns?

How do parties target voters? Surprisingly none of the major approaches to the election process-spatial models, alignment studies, and party organization studies-directly examine the goals of parties. The main purpose of this paper is (1) to suggest that the three strands in the electoral politics literature raise several important issues for parties' election campaigns; (2) to develop a theoretical framework which may be used to examine, parties' targeting strategies. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.