Abstract.This paper deals with the question of how political parties define their electoral strategies in a multiparty system within a segmented society. In trying to answer this question various concepts as developed by Sani and Sartori are discussed, especially the distinction they make between ‘expansive’and ‘defensive’strategies and the exclusion from their analysis of so‐called ‘non‐relevant’parties. A brief study of electoral strategies of the Dutch political parties during the heyday of pillarization in the 1940s and 1950s supports this criticism. It also stresses the fact that party strategies are defined by the perceptions of partisan elites at a given moment and cannot be explained bypost hocconstructs like the stability of the party system or the closedness of the segm