Do parties frame policies in terms of owned issues? Parties’ policy position motivations in Voting Advice Applications in Belgium

Political parties prefer to focus their communication on owned issues, as they have both a strong reputation amongst the public (Petrocik, 1989) and a strong set of arguments for their policy positions (Riker, 1993; Egan, 2013) regarding these issues. Yet, parties oftentimes have little control over the topics they communicate on, because competing parties and exogenous events force them to address issues that are owned by other parties (Sigelman & Buell, 2004). We argue that when forced to address unowned issues, parties will attempt to link such issues to their owned issues. We test this hypothesis for three Belgian general elections, using novel data collected for the 2007, 2009 and 2014 Voting Advice Application Stemtest. All political parties were asked to take a position on more than 200 policy statements related to a wide range of issues, and were asked to provide a brief argumentation for their position. The parties were free to choose which issues they mentioned to substantiate their positions. We examine whether parties, when providing a motivation for their position on a policy issue they do not own, refer to issues they do own. We use a dictionary-based automated content analysis to assign issue codes to these arguments, based on the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codebook. This analysis allows to test which issues parties use to substantiate their position on a specific policy proposal, and whether issue owning parties indeed tend to turn to their owned issues even when substantiating positions about other issues. We find that there indeed is an issue ownership effect; parties tend to reframe unowned issues in terms of an issue they do own.