The DUP shifted from unionist vote-sharing pacts to outbidding rival unionist parties.

Evidence

As Farrington points out, while the DUP sacrificed its goals for the ‘greater cause of unionism’ in the 1970s and 1980s by entering into electoral pacts with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and by refusing to split the unionist vote, it changed strategy during the period of the peace process with an electoral maximization strategy of ‘winning seats from those anti-agreement unionists who were not part of the DUP’ (2006, p. 174). In the 2007 Assembly election, the electoral extinction of the United Kingdom Unionist Party (UKUP) was one obvious casualty of the revised strategy, amid accusations from the DUP that the UKUP could be helping Sinn Fe´in become the largest party by splitting the unionist vote (BBC, 2007b). — Cathy Gormley-Heenan and Roger Macginty, Ethnic Outbidding and Party…, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s comparative question: the DUP’s outbidding operates on the intra-bloc right flank (against the UUP/UKUP) rather than on the cross-community center — useful for testing whether outbidding dynamics differ by regime type alongside the Kenya/Zambia case.
• QUESTION: The switch from ‘sacrifice for greater unionism’ to intra-unionist outbidding marks a regime shift in how the party positioned threat — is this anticipatory status threat responding to Sinn Fein’s rise post-Agreement?

Related

• Parties can wield elections as outbidding instruments against peace processes (similarity 0.79)
• Ethnic parties shift toward moderation only after securing dominance over in-group rivals (similarity 0.79)
• The DUP’s post-Agreement gains came from mobilizing apathetic unionists, not attracting new voters. (similarity 0.78)