Despite the normative importance of a clear party stance to political competition and representation, research has
discovered that parties and candidates tend to employ the “broad-appeal” strategy to becloud their true policy
intentions in order to expand their electoral support. Empirical work by Somer-Topcu demonstrates evidence that
being ambiguous indeed helps political parties gain votes in elections since equivocal messages make voters
underestimate the preference divergence between themselves and parties. In this article, we ask under what
conditions would the “broad-appeal” strategy fail to work? We then propose internal unity of political parties as a
critical condition for this strategy to work effectively. If a party is internally divided, conflict within the party
accentuates the true policy intentions of the party and then counterbalances the discounting effect of being ambiguous
on voters’ perceptions. Using survey data from the German Internet Panel, we show that voters underestimate policy
distances to ambiguous parties only if they perceive them as internally united. Using a two-stage estimator, we also
present evidence that the underestimation of policy distances affects voters’ vote choices.
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