Owning the Frame? Issue Ownership and Opposition Responses to Security Policy Reframing

Security policy issues are not static. Over time, topics such as military interventions, defence spending, or arms control have been repeatedly reframed, shifting between peace-oriented and security-centred narratives in response to changing geopolitical contexts. While existing research has extensively analysed party positions on foreign and security policy, it often treats issue frames as stable or focuses primarily on government behaviour. As a result, we know little about how opposition parties strategically respond when governing parties actively reframe an established security issue. Government-led reframing poses a strategic dilemma for opposition parties. On the one hand, resisting the new framing and maintaining prior positions may signal consistency and ideological coherence. On the other hand, such resistance risks marginalisation if the dominant discourse shifts, rendering existing positions less salient or credible. Accommodating the new framing, by contrast, may facilitate adaptation and differentiation but can undermine a party's credibility by contradicting prior commitments or long-standing programmatic stances. Opposition parties thus cannot simply ignore reframing efforts but must actively decide how to position themselves in a changing discursive environment. This paper argues that opposition responses to security issue reframing are shaped by parties' prior relationship to the issue, particularly their degree of issue ownership. Issue ownership is understood as a durable association between a party and a policy domain, rooted in historical engagement, programmatic emphasis, and voter expectations. Parties with strong issue ownership face higher reputational and strategic costs when accommodating a new frame, as adaptation may threaten their credibility and blur established issue linkages. These parties are therefore more likely to resist reframing and defend established narratives. In contrast, parties without strong ownership ties enjoy greater flexibility and are more likely to accommodate reframing to strategically reposition themselves. While one might expect that strong issue owners could leverage their credibility to lead reframing efforts, the paper theorises that ownership creates path dependencies that constrain rather than enable discursive flexibility. Empirically, the paper analyses parliamentary debates on security policy. Issue reframing is operationalised through changes in the co-occurrence patterns of key terms over time, capturing shifts in the dominant discursive structure of security debates. Party positions are estimated using text-as-data scaling techniques, allowing for systematic comparison of positional change in response to reframing. To probe the causal mechanisms underlying these patterns, the paper includes a theory-guided case study on arms control debates in Germany. The paper contributes to research on party competition and political discourse by demonstrating that opposition strategies are conditioned not only by policy substance but also by changes in issue framing. By linking discursive change to issue ownership, it advances a dynamic perspective on opposition behaviour and offers a framework for understanding how parties navigate the tensions between consistency and adaptation under shifting security narratives.