How Parties Frame their Issues: Frame Ownership vs. Frame Diversity

Issue ownership provides parties with an electoral advantage: when voters associate a party with a specific issue and consider it most competent to handle this issue, chances increase that they cast their vote for this party. Research has shown that parties can, by framing the issue in a favorable way, influence voters’ issue ownership perceptions to their advantage. However, this research mostly analyses how non-owning parties reframe issues, thus neglecting the framing strategies of issue owning parties. In this paper, we try to fill this void and test two contrasting assumptions on the framing behavior of issue owners derived from different literatures. On the one hand, we develop a “frame ownership hypothesis”, stating that on owned issues, parties put forward one strong, party-owned frame that exploit voters’ extant party beliefs and stereotypes and thus appear as more accessible and credible for voters. On the other hand, we test a “frame diversity hypothesis”, claiming that on owned issues, parties use a wider range of different frames in order to appeal to the values of different voter segments and to stir the interest of the media who like to cover an issue from different angles. Based on content analysis of German party manifestos from the 2009 and 2013 elections, we use an entropy score to measure parties’ frame diversity. Our results suggest that issue owning parties in general tend to adopt diverse set of frames towards owned issues. However, the variation and thus the entropy scores differ depending on ideological positions, electoral strength and government status of the parties.