Parties' Attention towards the Refugee Issue – Exploring Salience Strategies in Parliamentary Debates

Since at latest summer 2015, opinion polls show that the refugee issue is mentioned to be as far the most important issue within European politics. The issue not only dominates public debate but has also profoundly changed the party systems of many European countries. Recently, there have been several studies analyzing what drives public opinion towards refugees (e.g., Bansak et al. 2016, Hangartner et al. 2017, Czymara and Schmidt-Catran 2017). However, we know surprisingly little about to what degree the importance attributed to the refugee issue in public debate is reflected in parliament and here particularly within parliamentary debates. Knowledge is also missing about what drives parties to address this issue on the floor. So far issue salience in general, defined as the relative importance a party devotes to a topic, as well as the salience of the broader immigration issue in particular have been analyzed primarily by studying party manifestos (e.g., Green-Pedersen and Otjes 2017, Kortmann and Stecker 2017). However, participation in parliamentary debates is also seen as a part of party competition because parties can use it to send policy signals to their parties, other parties and voters (Proksch and Slapin, 2012). Thus emphasizing a specific issue within parliamentary debates is a further communication tool of parties to their voters. To understand why parties place emphasis on specific issues, literature points to mainly two strategies (e.g., Wagner and Meyer 2014). First, according to the idea of issue ownership (Budge and Farlie 1983, Petrocik 1996), parties are likely to talk as much as possible about the issue they own and to downplay or ignore the issues where they perform relatively worse. And, second, there is the idea that parties pay attention to those issues that are of current interest within the electorate and the media (riding the wave) (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994, Klüver and Spoon 2014). Based on these ideas, the proposed paper will contribute to new insights into what drives parties’ salience strategies within parliamentary debate by applying the following research question: What influences the attention parties pay to the refugee issue within parliamentary debate? This research question will be analyzed in a longitudinal cross-sectional, cross-party analysis for Germany as a country that has been and still is strongly influenced by the so-called refugee crisis. By relying on data of parliamentary debates in the 16 German state parliaments between 2013 and 2018, I analyze, in a first step, whether there are differences in the attention German parties pay to the refugee issue. In a second step, the focus will be on whether parties pursue an issue ownership or riding the wave strategy with regards to this specific issue. Based on existing research, I differentiate between party-specific, situational and structural factors (Kortmann and Stecker, 2017). While the former (mainly parties’ ideological belonging) are interpreted as reflecting issue ownership strategy, the two latter (e.g., voting intentions for the far-right party, far-right challenger in parliament, share of refugees in state) are seen as signs of a riding the wave strategy.