Framing Strategies on Environment and Energy in the Recent Federal Election Campaigns in Germany and Switzerland: Responding to the Fear of Nuclear Power After the Fukushima?

Traditionally, scholarship on election campaigns assumed that parties avoid engaging with the issues owned by their opponents. However, important events that impact public opinion and success of challenger parties can prompt mainstream parties to start a dialogue on the issues owned by challengers. I expect that parties largely engage in this dialogue on the framing dimension, promoting their definition of the issue or justifying proposed policy solutions. Research has shown that parties can use framing to influence voters’ issue ownership perception to their advantage and frame unowned issues using own partisan frames. At the same time, I argue that ideologically close parties can engage with the opponents’ frames and adopt frame borrowing strategies, utilising strong frames of their opponents’ who own the issues at stake aiming to win over voters. In my paper, I explore framing strategies of both mainstream and challenger parties and analyse how ideological proximity and governmental status contribute to the choice of framing strategy. I focus on energy and environment issues, traditionally owned by Green parties, in two successive federal election campaigns in Germany (2009, 2013) and Switzerland (2011, 2015) accounting for the impact of the Fukushima disaster. The events at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011 triggered public and political discussion on safety of nuclear energy in Europe. I expect that both in Germany and in Switzerland it prompted other parties to engage with the “Green” issues. In Germany, the success of the Greens in the German states in the aftermath of the Fukushima reflected the importance of the nuclear energy issue to the voters. Few months later the governmental coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP had to revoke its recent decision to extend the life of nuclear power plants and pronounced nuclear phase-out. In Switzerland, the Fukushima had similar resonance. After a series of referendum campaigns, the citizens finally backed nuclear phase-out and voted in favour of renewable energy in the 2017 referendum. However, the populist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the largest party in the Swiss Federal Assembly, opposed this move. I argue that as a strong issue owner SVP adopted strong partisan frames towards the energy issue. For the other parties, I expect decrease in framing diversity over the “Green” issues between the Green parties and mainstream parties in Germany elections 2013 and Swiss elections 2015. I further assume that ideological proximity to the Greens prompted left parties to adopt frame borrowing strategy and “steal” ecological framing. To test my assumptions, I analyse a dataset comprising party manifestos and press releases coded according to an extended version of the Policy Frames Codebook (Boydstun and Gross 2014) and Comparative Agendas Project issue coding scheme.