Explaining Framing Mechanisms in Election Campaigns in Switzerland in 2011 and 2015

For decades, research on elections has focused on contextual framework of electoral campaigns, interplay between parties and voters, parties’ ideology, policy positions, and issues parties address. Framing theory, recently borrowed from the field of political communication, has highlighted the importance of framing as a new dimension of party competition. Existing scholarship in the field of party competition has focused on specific frames, overlooking the mechanisms of framing. My paper aims to explore framing mechanisms, specifically frame transformation and frame diffusion, and reveal the factors that influence the choice of framing strategy by political parties. I argue that party type, power within the parliament and government, and ideology combined with the context of elections affect the parties’ choice of specific framing strategy and thus define the mechanism. I test my theoretical assumptions using combination of various data (manifestos and political ads in the newspapers) from two recent federal elections in Switzerland (2011 and 2015). I identify the frames using quantitative content analysis and trace the use of specific framing mechanisms by the means of network analysis. Further, I analyse the role of specific factors and electoral campaign context in shaping framing mechanisms.