Issue dialogue and framing networks on energy and environment in the Swiss and German Federal Election Campaigns (2009-2019)

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. As real-world events impact political agenda they put into public spotlight issues that some parties neglect and force 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. In my paper, I explore issue engagement and framing of energy and environment issues in the recent Federal election campaigns in Germany (2009-2017) and Switzerland (2011-2019). Specifically, I explore how parties frame the issues and how frames diffuse across parties, revealing the discourse networks on environment and energy. 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. Combined with the network analysis, the paper sheds light on the structure and dynamics of framing networks on environment and energy in election campaigns in Germany and Switzerland before and after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.