Political parties can influence public discourses and affect public opinion by presenting their policies through frames. Framing therefore means to present issues by emphasizing a subset of considerations, while omitting others to focus on, when constructing citizens’ opinions. Experimental studies prove that party identification constraints any framing effects on respondent’s political preferences, if the issue is in the center of political conflict. In this case of a high competitive political environment, partisanship plays a fundamental role for public opinion and is even more stable than core political values. The main literature on framing effects focuses on a dual-party system in majority vote systems and, although a competitive political environment matters for policy preferences, multiparty systems are not yet analyzed. Different partisan structures may entail potential different results for mainstream and niche party adherents. This paper aims to address the difficulties of applying previous assumptions and results on multiparty systems.
