Same, same but different: Issue dialogue and Framing Strategies in Election Campaigns

Recent research has challenged traditional approach to party competition that parties campaign on owned issues and downplay issues owned by their opponents. Empirical studies show that rather than talking past each other parties often trespass on their opponents’ issues. Real-world events impact political agenda putting into public spotlight issues that some parties neglect and forcing them to engage in issue dialogue. Framing facilitates issue dialogue allowing parties to distinguish themselves through the way they talk about the issue. That is, how parties define the issue, what justification or what result of the proposed policy solution do they promote. The paper offers a cohesive analytical framework demonstrating how exogenous shocks, party-specific and systemic factors influence issue engagement and parties’ framing strategies in election competition. I argue that parties prioritise diverse framing strategies: frame avoidance, internal frame diffusion, frame engagement, and reframing. Frame avoidance considers the cases when parties avoid framing an issue. In case of internal frame diffusion, parties reframe unowned issues alongside party values and beliefs. Frame engagement describes the strategy when parties use the frames of their opponents. The last strategy comprises all other cases, that is when parties reframe using frames unowned by any party in the system. Empirically, I focus on the recent Federal election campaigns in Germany (2009-2017) and Switzerland (2011-2019).The paper relies on manual content analysis of party manifestos, ads and press releases coded following an extended version of the Policy Frames Codebook (Boydstun and Gross 2014) and CAP issue coding scheme. Interviews with campaign managers complement the content analysis.