Non-policy politics is critical for electoral success. Parties routinely signal managerial competence, mobilize their activists, and deliver selective incentives to win elections. Here, we illuminate our conceptualization of electoral responsiveness with empirical information about voter preferences and politicians’ strategies in Argentina and Chile to show that voters’ demands constrained politicians in the short term but that supply politics matters as well in the long term. We assume that democracies with working political parties, which allow free flows of information, generate the incentives that make vote-seeking politicians operate as our framework suggests: combining distinct strategies to attract diverse groups of voters. In doing so, we seek to bridge the divide between the literature on advanced democracies, more focused on policy and competence, and the scholarship on new democracies, more centered on targeted distribution. Our broader conceptualization of electoral responsiveness can be extended to widely different democracies, adapting the dimensions of non-policy politics used to explain the incentives generated by electoral competition on politicians as well as the categories of voters they identify for targeting their offers. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of this broader conceptualization of electoral responsiveness.