Why do parties choose some issue frames over others?
A model of party issue framing.
Jonas Lefevere 1
Julie Sevenans ²
Christophe Lesschaeve ²
Stefaan Walgrave ²
1
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam
2
Media Movements & Politics (M²P), University of Antwerp
Abstract
Communication is crucial for politics, and consequently parties are highly strategic in their
communication. The extant work on how parties communicate strategically on issues has theorized
why parties would focus on specific issues over others—e.g. focusing on owned issues, or rather
converging on dominant campaign issues. Moreover, a variety of studies have examined how parties
frame the issues they do address. Yet, theoretical models to understand why parties choose certain
issue frames over others are lacking, partly because the extant work on party issue framing remains
limited to studies on single issues. We develop a theoretical framework of party issue framing,
accounting for features of parties—issue ownership and government participation—and public
opinion—the salience of issues amongst the public at large, and the popularity of a party’s position.
We test this model for three Belgian general elections, using novel data collected for the 2007, 2009
and 2014 Voting Advice Application Stemtest. All political parties were asked to take a position on
more than 200 policy statements related to a wide range of issues. Most importantly, all parties were
asked to provide a brief argumentation for their position, which allowed them to frame the issue as
they saw fit: The parties were free to choose which issues they mentioned to substantiate their
positions. We examine which issues parties use in their framing of these issue positions—sticking to
the issue on which they were asked to position themselves, or rather incorporating other issues in
their argumentation. We use a dictionary-based automated content analysis to assign issue codes to
these arguments, based on the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codebook. The findings indicate
that parties do frame issue positions in terms of other issues, and that issue ownership and salience
affect issue framing.
1
Introduction
As partisan alignments have weakened, parties are increasingly strategic in their communications in
an attempt to secure electoral support. One important way in which parties can communicate
strategically is through issue emphasis (Sides, 2006). A number of authors have shown that by
selectively (de-)emphasizing some issues over others, parties can increase their electoral support
(e.g. Budge & Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996; Sides, 2007; Simon, 2002). In turn, a variety of studies
have examined the determinants of parties’ issue strategies. For example, issue ownership theory
posits that parties will emphasize issues on which they hold a strong reputation (Budge & Farlie,
1983; Petrocik, 1989).
Yet, extant research has documented that parties do not always focus on their owned or preferred
issues (Dolezal, Ennser-Jedenastik, Müller, & Winkler, 2014; Sigelman & Buell, 2004): external factors
may force parties to address other issues as well, as to not appear out of touch with the major issues
of the day (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1994). For example, in the context of an election campaign,
voters expect parties to announce their positions on a broad range of issues. Yet, even in such
instances, parties can still act strategically with regards to how they address the issue. Parties try to
frame issues in the most advantageous terms (Chong & Druckman, 2007a): as policy is increasingly
complex, parties can strategically emphasize specific aspects of these issues: “Elites spend as much
time and money as they do crafting and disseminating frames on the assumption that the frames that
prevail will … influence what the public is prepared to support” (Kinder, 2003, p. 359). Indeed, party
elites have been shown to apply different frames to issues with great effect on public opinion (e.g.
Holian, 2004; Slothuus, 2010).
That said, our understanding of why elites adopt certain issue frames remains limited. As a general
rule, party elites are expected to emphasize different aspects of policies to gain the upper hand in an
issue debate, effectively talking past one another (Schattschneider, 1960; Simon, 2002, but see Jerit,
2007). But apart from this overarching expectation, there is little theoretical work regarding parties’
preferences to use some issue frames over others. A number of studies have investigated how party
elites frame issues, but they remain constrained to studying a limited set of issues (e.g. Holian, 2004;
Jerit, 2007; van de Wardt, 2015). This limitation makes it hard to assess the determinants of parties’
issue framing, as the factors that have been found to matter may be constrained to the issues that
were studied. Moreover, the limited amount of issues does not allow scholars to disentangle the
various, and oftentimes confounded, determinants of parties’ issue framing. As Chong and Druckman
argue, a key remaining challenge is “developing a model of elite strategies of framing” (2007a, p.
118).
This paper develops a theoretical framework to understand elite’s strategies of issue framing.
Concretely, it investigates whether parties strategically frame certain issue positions in terms of other
issues. Combining the principles of issue emphasis theory with those of framing theory, we argue
that parties, when forced to address issues on which they do not have an electoral advantage, try to
optimize electoral benefits by including references to their preferred issues. Our framework attempts
to determine the conditions under which parties engage in this strategy. It takes into account
features of parties—their reputation for dealing with specific issues, and their position in either
government or opposition—and public opinion—the extent to which the issue is important to the
2
public, and the extent to which the public supports the party’s policy position on the issue—to
explain parties’ issue framing strategies.
To test our propositions, we use data collected prior to the Belgian general elections of 2007, 2009
and 2014. Belgium is a small consociational democracy in Western Europe with a fragmented party
system (Deschouwer, 2009). Extant research predominantly relies on indirect measures of parties’
issue emphasis, such as media coverage (Jerit, 2007) or expert surveys (van de Wardt, 2015). We rely
on a direct measure of party communication gathered for the development of a Voting Advice
Application (VAA): we asked all political parties to take a position on a large number of policy
statements. Most importantly, we then asked parties to provide an argumentation for their position.
We issue code their argumentation to examine how parties frame the issue—sticking to the issue on
which the policy statement was focused, or bringing in additional issues to strengthen their
argumentation.
We find that parties do frame issue positions in terms of other issues. Issue ownership matters in this
respect: the better a party’s reputation on an issue, the more likely it is to frame another issue in
terms of that owned issue. The higher the salience of the issue, however, the less likely the party is to
use other issues in the framing of the issue. Contrary to expectations, opposition parties’ framing
strategies do not differ from those of government parties, and the popularity of a party’s position
does not explain elites’ issue framing either. We discuss the implications of our findings in the
concluding section.
Party issue framing
Parties are, by their very nature, policy seeking: their ultimate goal is to implement policies on issues.
As a consequence, a major component of party conflict is the debate over issues: though overarching
policy goals are oftentimes agreed upon—all parties want a growing economy, for example—the way
to achieve these goals is highly contingent on party ideology. As a result, for any given issue parties
attempt to propagate a perspective that favors their solutions. In their competition over issues,
parties can take roughly two strategies—they can either stick to their own message, or engage the
other party’s message (Simon, 2002). Most scholars argue that not engaging the other party in a
dialogue tends to be the superior strategy from the party’s perspective, as this is the most likely to
result in an electoral win (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996; Simon, 2002). This strategy manifests
itself on two levels. First, parties can choose to discuss some issues over others. Issue ownership
theory argues that parties should stick to their own issues, and avoid talking about their opponent’s
issues (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996). Secondly, though parties can choose to discuss similar
issues (Sigelman & Buell, 2004), they can emphasize different aspects of these issues by applying
different frames.
Framing is defined as an “emphasis in salience of different aspects of a topic” (De Vreese, 2005, p.
53). By emphasizing different frames, parties attempt to promote a perspective on an issue that
favors their solutions: Frames entail a specific definition of the problem, causal interpretation and
appropriate solution (Entman, 1993). Because parties are proponents of specific policies, they favor
frames that describe the issue in such a manner that facilitates the implementation of their policies
(Van der Pas, 2014). More generally, by promoting certain frames parties try to set the terms of an
3
issue debate, in order to achieve their policy goals. The idea that parties frame issues strategically is
described in various subsets of literature. For example, Riker’s (1993) dominance principle revolves
around the idea that parties try to focus on those aspects of issues that gives them the upper hand,
which is highly similar to applying different issue frames. Simon (2002) develops a model of rhetorical
strategy in which the rhetoric edge is achieved by staying ‘on message’ while avoiding those aspects
of the issue that favor the opposition. How parties frame issues is normatively important, as the
aforementioned studies suggest that parties are effectively ignoring each other when it comes to
policy (Simon, 2002). Though parties may ostensibly engage in conversations on similar issues when
they converge (Dolezal et al., 2014; Sigelman & Buell, 2004), different framing of these issues may
still result in selective monologues, which makes it hard for voters to engage in direct comparisons
between competing parties. Moreover, the idea of a deliberative democracy hardly fits campaigns
that revolve around ‘dueling monologues’ (van de Wardt, 2015, p. 840).
It is widely accepted that parties’ issue frames exert an important influence on public opinion
(Kinder, 2003). Various studies, ranging from experimental (Jacoby, 2000; Slothuus, 2010) to real life
issue debates (Hänggli & Kriesi, 2010; Holian, 2004; Nadeau, Pétry, & Bélanger, 2010) have shown
that elite frames affect public opinion. Subsequent work has aimed mainly to examine the
contingencies of issue framing effects, accounting for individual-level moderators (Slothuus, 2008),
the credibility of the elite source promoting the frame (Druckman, 2001), but also the fact that in real
life issue frames are rarely encountered in isolation. For example, when different parties
concurrently promote different issue frames, this alters the impact of individual frames on public
opinion (Chong & Druckman, 2007b; Slothuus & de Vreese, 2010).
Yet, despite the growing understanding that elite frames are important drivers of public opinion, we
know surprisingly little about what causes certain frames to be promoted in the first place.
Exceptions include the work of Van de Wardt (2015) and Helbling, Hoeglinger and Wüest (2010), but
their work remains confined to a single issue. Though work on the effects of issue frames sometimes
takes multiple issues into account (e.g. Sniderman & Theriault, 2004), it takes issue frames mostly as
a given, and then examines how these frames affect public opinion formation. Knowing how parties
use issue frames in their strategic communication is important, not only for framing research, but
research on party issue communication more generally (Chong & Druckman, 2007b): Issue ownership
posits that parties stick to their own issues, but recent research suggests that parties do not engage
in selective issue emphasis (Dolezal et al., 2014; Sigelman & Buell, 2004). However, convergence
examines only whether parties discuss the same issues, not how they discuss these issues (Lipsitz,
2013; van de Wardt, 2015). Parties might be emphasizing similar issues because these are issues of
concern to voters, but still avoid actual dialogue on these dominant campaign issues by applying
different frames. As such, the extant work that develops theory regarding selective emphasis at the
inter-issue level (e.g. Budge & Farlie, 1983; Damore, 2004, 2005; Dolezal et al., 2014; Petrocik, 1996)
needs to be complemented with a theory about the determinants of selective emphasis at the intraissue level: A theory of party issue framing (Chong & Druckman, 2007a, p. 118).
Returning to the definition of Entman (1993), frames consist of a problem definition, causal
interpretation and matching solution. We argue that one of the key ways in which parties can
attempt to shift the framing of an issue to their advantage is by expanding either the problem
definition, causal interpretation or solutions towards other issues. For example, a party might
attempt to frame a policy involving a tax raise—presumably an unpopular policy solution—by
4
expanding the problem definition to incorporate the fact that this tax raise will help fund expanded
social security benefits. Williams (2006) argues as much in her discussion of how radical right-wing
parties expanded towards new issues: while retaining some aspects of the existing views on these
issues, they infused other—more advantageous—issues into their framing of these issues. On
economic issues, for example, they might point to the detrimental influence of migrant workers for
employment rates of native workers. In her study on US health care reform, Jerit (2007) shows that
in their issue framing, parties used arguments related to different issues such as the economy or the
budget. As such, we examine how parties frame issues by examining the whether they attempt to
expand the issue frame by including additional issues—and if so, which issues. Our theoretical
framework accounts for two sets of determinants of party issue framing. On the one hand, we expect
that features of parties, namely their reputations for dealing with issues and their position in either
government or opposition, will affect how they frame issues. On the other hand, we also expect that
how elites frame issues is dependent on public opinion, namely the salience of issues amongst the
public and the popularity of the party’s position on the issue.
In terms of party features, we expect that parties’ issue ownership drives their use of issue frames, as
they will try to steer the issue frame towards owned issues. Issue ownership refers to the public
perception that a party is better able to ‘handle’ an issue than its competitors (Budge & Farlie, 1983;
Petrocik, 1989, 1996). Parties build reputations on issues through a history of policy attention.
Though the key proposition of issue ownership theory is at the inter-issue level—parties are
expected to focus on owned issues, while ignoring issues owned by other parties—we expect that
party reputations will also affect parties’ issue framing strategy. On owned issues, parties have a
competitive advantage: various studies have shown that parties’ stronger reputations on owned
issues foster electoral support (for an overview, see Walgrave, Tresch, & Lefevere, 2015). Moreover,
Riker’s (1993) dominance principle posits that parties will focus on those arguments that dominate
those of their competitors. On owned issues, parties have the most dominating rhetorical edge: not
only because they are perceived as being comparatively better than their competition on the issue,
but also because issue owning parties tend to focus their legislative efforts on the issues they own
(Egan, 2013; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011). As a result, issue owning parties have more substantive
policy implementations to show off to voters. Van der Pas (2014) argues that as parties can own
issues, they can also own certain issue frames: In this manner, it is easy to see why parties would
attempt to propagate issue frames related to their owned issues: Williams (2006) found that radical
right-wing parties did just that, as they expanded their issue repertoire by infusing new issues, such
as the economy, with their arguments related to their core issues (asylum seekers and immigrants).
Similarly, we expect that:
H1: Issue ownership determines party issue framing. The better the party’s reputation on an
issue, the more likely it is that it will frame its positions in terms of that issue, and vice versa.
A second feature of parties we take into account is their status as a government or opposition party.
Whether parties are in government or opposition has a fundamental impact on their behavior. Put
simply, parties that are in government are in a position to enact policy, whereas opposition parties
are constrained to reacting to governmental policy initiatives. Though government participation is
thus the ideal situation for a policy-seeking party, it also has a downside, as parties can be held
accountable for their actions while in office. In his study of party reactions to media coverage,
Thesen (2013) finds that Danish government parties were likely to respond to criticism on a wide
5
variety of issues, whereas opposition parties could be more selective in their issue selection. Other
agenda setting studies also show that government parties address a wider range of issues (GreenPedersen & Mortensen, 2010; Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011). Because their institutional position
makes them accountable, government parties will therefore have less freedom in how they frame an
issue: implementing policy carries with it the responsibility to defend that policy from attack, even if
a party would rather avoid talking about the issue.
H2: Government parties will be less likely than opposition parties to include other issues in
their framing of an issue position.
We also theorize that public opinion is an important driver of parties’ campaign agendas. The fact
that parties are very attentive to public preferences should come as no surprise (Sides, 2006).
Specifically, we focus on two features of public opinion that determine how parties frame issues.
Firstly, we expect that on more salient issues, parties will stick to the issue and will avoid promoting
frames that incorporate other issues. The reason for this is simple: parties want to avoid appearing
disingenuous, especially on issues that the public finds highly important. By applying an issue frame
that shifts the problem definition or causal interpretation towards other issue domains, parties risk
being seen as dodging the important issues. By addressing “the major issues of the day, candidates
are more likely to be seen as concerned, responsive, and informed” (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1994, p.
337). Indeed, examining parties’ campaign agenda’s in a variety of US campaigns, Sides (2006) finds
that candidate’s campaign agendas were driven in large part by the public’s priorities. Druckman and
colleagues (2010) find that congressional candidates are more likely to engage each other on highly
salient issues, a finding that might indicate that on such salient issues parties do not wish to be seen
as diverting attention to other issues. As such, we expect that:
H3: The higher the salience of an issue amongst the public, the less likely parties will include
other issues in their framing of positions on that issue.
Finally, we expect that the popularity of a policy position amongst the public will affect party issue
framing. The proximity model of voting argues that voters prefer parties that are relatively closer to
their position on an issue (Downs, 1957; Westholm, 1997). However, oftentimes parties are forced to
take positions that are distant from the bulk of the electorate. This can be a consequence of prior
government participation, or the fact that a given policy position corresponds to the ideology of the
party—e.g. Green parties tend to favor road taxes, presumably not because taxes are popular, but
because this policy corresponds to their striving for environmental preservation. As a solution to this,
parties may attempt to incorporate other issues on which they have arguments that resonate more
with the public’s whim: The typical political strategy is to make clear how a proposal relates to a
popular idea or value amongst the population (Chong & Druckman, 2007b, p. 116). Hence, parties
will try to increase their vote share by focusing their framing on other issues where they are closer to
the median voter (Simon, 2002).
H4: The more unpopular a party’s position on a specific policy is, the more likely it is that it
will attempt to frame that position on the basis of other issues.
6
Data and methods
We rely on data that were collected prior to the 2007, 2009 and 2014 Belgian elections in the
framework of the Voting Advice Application (VAA). To construct the VAAs, we asked the six main
Flemish parties1 to take a position on a large number of statements (N = 288; for number of
statements per year see Table 2). An example of a statement from the 2014 election is: “People who
have not yet worked, should not receive unemployment benefits”. First, the parties had to indicate
whether they agree or disagree with a given statement. Second, we asked them to provide an
argumentation why they take this position. A party that disagreed with the statement above, for
instance, said: “The unemployed have the right to get good support for finding a job. This support
should consist of adequate placement, but also of unemployment benefits. Because those who are
poor, have more difficulties finding a job.” Another party, agreeing with the statement, gave other
arguments: “Unemployment benefits are an acquired social right. Only those who have contributed to
it, can benefit from it. People who have not yet worked should be activated via education or a job in
their neighborhood, and have only right to a very basic income.” These data offer a direct measure of
party communication and allow us as such to test our hypotheses about the strategic framing of
issue positions.
All statements, as well as all parties’ argumentations for their positions, were issue coded according
to the codebook of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). This codebook, originally developed by
Baumgartner and Jones (1993) in the US (see: www.comparativeagendas.net), and afterwards
slightly adapted to the Belgian context, contains 21 major policy issue codes (e.g. ‘Macro-Economics’,
‘Education’, ‘Environment’,…). The coding of statements and argumentations into these major issue
categories was done automatically by means of a topic dictionary. The dictionary, developed in the
framework of the INFOPOL-project2, contains a key set of words for each major issue category. We
used Lexicoder (see: www.lexicoder.com) to count how many words of each topic occur in each
statement and argumentation. A coding example is given below (see Table 1)—for more information
about the coding procedure and the performance of the dictionary-based approach, we refer to
Sevenans et al. (2014).
Dependent variable
As we are interested in the extent to which parties use other issues in their framing of an issue, the
dependent variable used in this study, Reference to Other Issue, is a dummy variable nested in issues
(N = 19)3, statements (N = 288) and parties (N = 6). The variable has value ‘1’ if a specific party, in the
argumentation for their position about a certain statement, used a word from a specific issue to
which the statement itself did not refer. If the statement itself referred to the issue as well; or if the
1
As we only have data for the Flemish political parties, we focus on Flanders, the largest region of Belgium. The
green party (Groen!), the socialist party (sp.a), the Christian-democrats (CD&V), the liberal party (Open VLD),
the Flemish nationalist party (N-VA), and the extreme-right party (Vlaams Belang).
2
The authors gratefully acknowledge support of the European Research Council (Advanced Grant ‘INFOPOL’, N°
295735) and of the Research Fund of the University of Antwerp (Grant N° 26827). Stefaan Walgrave (University
of Antwerp) is principal investigator of the INFOPOL project, which has additional teams in Israel (led by Tamir
Sheafer) and Canada (led by Peter Loewen and Stuart Soroka).
3
Two CAP policy issues, namely ‘Scientific Research, Technology and Communications’ and ‘Spatial Planning’,
did not occur in any Statement and are therefore left out of all analyses in this paper.
7
statement referred to the issue but the party did not, the variable gets value ‘0’. An example of this
calculation can also be found in the coding example below (see Table 1).
Table 1—Coding example (dictionary-based approach)
Statement X: Flanders should not subsidize regional airports.
Argumentation of party Y: Regional airports are expensive and harmful for the environment and the
public health as a consequence of noise pollution, air pollution and olfactory nuisance.
Statement
Party
Issue
X
Y
X
Y
Number of words
about issue
counted in
statement
Mobility and 1 (‘airports’)
Transport
Environment 0
Number of words
about issue
counted in
argumentation
1 (‘airports’)
Reference to
Other Issue (DV)
X
Y
Health
0
3 (‘environment’, 1
2 x ‘pollution’)
1 (‘health’)
1
X
Y
Education
0
0
0
…
…
…
…
…
…
0
Furthermore, we use the dictionary coding of the statements to determine the main issue of each
statement. Concretely we take the issue category for which the dictionary counted most words. In
the example statement above, the dictionary counted only one word (‘airports’ was coded into topic
‘Mobility and Transport’), so the main issue would be Mobility and Transport. To break ties—for
instance, when the dictionary would count one word from the topic Macro-Economics and one word
from topic Immigration and Integration—we use the topic that is first mentioned within the
statement. If a statement contains no word from the dictionary at all, we are unable to attribute a
main issue to the statement. In total, we are able to classify 72.5% of all statements into a main
issue. The main issue will later be used to calculate the variable Salience of Statement Issue, which
we use to test our third hypothesis (see below).
As a control variable, we finally also use the Lexicoder software to count the number of words each
argumentation consists of, simply because longer argumentations have a larger chance to include
multiple issues.
Independent variables
We use various additional datasets to construct the independent variables of the study. For one, we
rely on public opinion data, which was gathered amongst a representative sample of the Belgian
population (N PER YEAR). The field work for these surveys was conducted by TNS in 2007 and 2014,
and by Ivox in 2009. For each survey, respondents were recruited from the ongoing research panels
maintained by the research firm. In addition to asking respondents to take positions on the
statements, it also contains measures of party preference and issue salience. Based on these survey,
we concretely construct two variables.
8
First, we calculate how salient various issues were in the different elections. The following survey
question was used to assess the importance of a certain issue X for a respondent: Is issue X one of the
three policy domains which are decisive for you when making a choice for a political party and its
positions? (0 = Not decisive; 1 = Decisive). This question was asked for a whole range of different
issues. To get an idea of the general salience of an issue during a given election campaign, we took
the mean of all responses, finding for instance that in 2007 the topic ‘Immigration and Integration’
was decisive for the vote choice of 16.5% of the voters. Subsequently, we linked this measure of
issue salience to the main issue of each statement in our dataset (see above), as such creating the
variable Salience of Statement Issue which we will use to test Hypothesis 3. For instance, this variable
is .165 for statements from the 2007 VAA that have ‘Immigration and Integration’ as their main issue,
because this is the percentage of voters that indicated this topic to be amongst the most salient
topics for their vote choice.
Second, the citizen survey allowed us to calculate, for each statement, what percentage of the
citizens agrees with each statement. These data are used to calculate Unpopularity of Party’s
Position, which is the absolute difference between a party’s position and the average position of the
population. For instance, if 23% of the citizens agrees with a statement, a party in favor of this
statement has an unpopularity score of .77, while a party against the statement has score .23. Thus,
increasing values indicate less popular positions. This variable will be used to test Hypothesis 4.
In addition to the citizen survey, we employ long term CAP data on party manifestos to measure a
party’s reputation on an issue, which we label Issue Ownership. In the framework of the Belgian CAP
project, all party manifestos from 1977 to 2007 were manually coded according to the CAP codebook
on the quasi-sentence level (same codebook according to which statements and argumentations are
coded).
All
information
about
the
data
collection
can
be
found
on
www.comparativeagendas.net/belgium. Across all manifesto’s written by a given party over the
years, we calculate the share of attention given by that party to each respective CAP major issue
category. Using this measure as a proxy for issue ownership is regularly done in political
communication research (see e.g. Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2011; Walgrave & Swert, 2007). We see
for instance that the Green party, more than other parties, pays attention to the environment in
their manifestos: 10% of their manifestos is about this issues; for other parties this proportion lies
between 2% and 5%. The Issue Ownership variable will be used for testing Hypothesis 1.
The original issue ownership concept, as defined by Petrocik (1996), defines a party as the ‘owner’ of
an issue when voters think that the party is better able than its opponents to handle problems
related to the issue. In this sense, issue ownership is essentially not determined by parties’
communication (such as in manifestos) but by voters’ perceptions of the relationship between
parties and issues. To test whether our results hold when we use this kind of issue ownership
measure, we additionally use data from the 2009 PartiRep Survey. This survey contained questions
about issue ownership as perceived by voters, namely: Which party comes to your mind when you
think about issue X? For each party and issue available in the survey, we calculated what percentage
of voters thinks about the respective party when thinking about the respective issue. We do not use
this measure of issue ownership in the main analyses of the paper, because it is not available for all
issues in our analyses, whereas the manifesto measure of issue ownership is available for all issues.
But we compare our findings with analyses using this alternative measure of issue-ownership, to
assess whether this affects our results.
9
Finally, we gathered factual data about the government-opposition division for the various
parliaments and legislatures under study. For each parliament/election in our study (2007, 2009,
2014), we indicate whether a party belonged to the incumbent government or not. The resulting
variable Government Party is used to test our second hypothesis.
Analyses
The resulting dataset has observations that are nested in issues, statements and parties. In principle,
one would expect the dataset to count 32,832 observations (19 issues * 288 statements * 6 parties).
However, for a number of reasons, we exclude a number of observations and there are some missing
values as well. First, we do not include issues when the respective parliament that is elected is not
authorized to deal with these issues. Concretely, for the 2007 and 2014 statements of the federal
VAA, we exclude issues ‘Agriculture’, ‘Education’, ‘Housing’ and ‘Culture and media’, because these
are exclusively regional competences. Similarly, for the 2009 and 2014 regional elections, we do not
include ‘Health’, ‘Justice and criminality’ and ‘Defense’ because these are exclusively federal
competences. Second, not all statements that were rated by parties were also rated by citizens in the
survey. So when the variable Unpopularity of Party’s Position is used, there are a number of missings.
Third, also for Salience of Statement Issue there are missings, because we could not attribute a main
issue to all statements and, moreover, we do not have salience data for all issues. Technical
information about the resulting precise sample sizes is provided in Table 2.
Table 2—Technical information
Number of statements rated by
political parties
Number of parties
Number of issues
Total N
Number of statements rated by the
population
N (when Unpopularity of Party’s
Position in model)
Number of statements to which a
main issue was attributed of which
we have issue salience data
N (when Salience of Statement Issue
in model)
2007
2009
2014
Federal
Regional
(Flanders)
Federal
36
79
6
15
3,240
36
Total
dataset
63
Regional
(Flanders
and
Brussels)
110
288
6
16
7,584
50
6
15
5,670
56
6
16
10,560
56
6
19
27,054
198
3,2104
4,7845
5,040
5,376
18,410
26
49
33
67
175
2,340
4,704
2,970
6,432
16,446
To analyze the data, we use mixed-effects logistic multilevel models. First, we include crossed
random effects on the level of parties and statements. These random factors control for the fact that
4
5
30 missings because one party refused to position itself on two statements
16 missings because one party refused to position itself on one statement
10
some parties use diverging issue frames more often than other parties; and for the fact that parties
in general diverge more on some statements than on others. Still, the random factors do not account
for all the variance on these levels, so that we can still test the effect of our independent variables.
Second, we include fixed effects on the issue level, which take all variance on the issue level away.
Finally, we systematically include the control variable Word Count. Our model is thus rather strict: we
control for the full interdependence between observations in our sample.
Descriptives
Before we move on to the results, we take a look some descriptive statistics of all variables. Table 3
shows that in 3.4% of all issue-statement-party combinations, a party’s argumentation refers to an
issue to which the statement itself did not refer, as indicated by the variable Word on Other Topic.
Regarding Issue Ownership, the average share of attention going to an issue in a party manifesto is
.05. There are some issues to which some parties pay almost no attention (min. value of IssueOwnership is .002), and some issues to which some parties pay lots of attention over the years (max.
value is .23). About half of all observations are argumentations by a Government Party. The mean
Salience of Statement Issue is .29, meaning that, on average, the issue of a statement is viewed as a
decisive policy domain by 29% of the voters. On average, the Unpopularity of a Party’s Position on a
given statement is .47. And the average argumentation counts about 36 words.
Table 3—Descriptive statistics
Word on Other Topic
Issue-Ownership
Government Party
Salience of Statement Issue
Unpopularity of Party’s Position
Word Count
Mean
0.03
0.05
0.48
0.29
0.47
35.57
S.D.
0.18
0.04
0.50
0.12
0.21
16.12
Min.
0.00
0.00
0.00
0.03
0.03
1
Max.
1.00
0.23
1.00
0.61
0.97
131
N
27,054
27,054
27,054
16,446
18,410
27,054
Results
The results of our analyses are displayed in Table 4. Because the N of the full model (Model 4) is
drastically reduced due to missing cases, we also run three models with only part of the independent
variables. As such we can see what the results look like when using the full sample.
The effect of Issue Ownership is positive and strongly significant in all models. We can confirm
Hypothesis 1. The likelihood that a party frames an argumentation in terms of an owned issue is
much larger than the likelihood that a party frames an argumentation in terms of a non-owned issue.
This relationship between a party’s reputation on an issue and their issue framing seems to be highly
robust. And, the effect is substantive: the predicted probabilities go from .01 when the party pays
little attention (less than 2%) to the issue in its manifestos, to .05 when the party pays a lot of
attention (20%) to the issue (see Figure 1).
The issue-ownership mechanism is nicely illustrated by parties’ responses to the statement ‘Flanders
should not subsidize regional airports’. The green party, owning the environmental issue, agrees with
the statement, arguing that ‘Regional airports are expensive and harmful for the environment and the
11
public health as a consequence of noise pollution, air pollution and olfactory nuisance’. They clearly
link the statement (issue: Mobility and Transport) to the environment. The liberal party—owner of
economy-related issues—agrees with the statement as well, but gives the following argumentation:
‘The development of regional airports is important for economic growth. The government can support
this via infrastructure subsidies. But the exploitation should be paid with private means.’ The
economic issue emphasis used here is totally different from that by the green party. Another, final
example is the following. In response to the statement ‘Flanders should spend less money on
development aid’, extreme-right party Vlaams Belang states that ‘The funds for development
cooperation should, in the first place, be invested in the countries of origin from the immigrants in our
country. And, the funding should be dependent on the willingness of these countries to take back the
foreigners that are expelled here’. This framing is not surprising, given this party’s ownership of the
immigration issue.
Our second hypothesis, about the effect of Government Party on issue framing, cannot be confirmed.
While the coefficient goes in the expected direction—it is negative, indicating that government
parties frame their positions less in terms of other issues—the effect is not at all significant in any of
the models.
Third, the findings for the variable Salience of Statement Issue are somewhat ambiguous. As
expected, the effect in Model 2 is negative and significant. The higher the salience of a statement’s
main issue, the less likely it is that parties frame their position about this issue in terms of other
issues. Regarding the effect size, predicted probabilities show that the effects are rather small: the
likelihood that an issue is framed in terms of other issues, decreases from .02 when issues are not at
all salient to .01 when they are salient (see Figure 2). And in Model 4, the effect of Salience of
Statement Issue is no longer significant (perhaps due to the lower N), though the coefficient is still
negative as expected. We can only cautiously confirm Hypothesis 3.
Finally, the findings do not corroborate Hypothesis 4 either. We expected that parties, when arguing
an unpopular position, would more often frame their position in terms of other issues. This does not
appear to be the case: the effect of Unpopularity of Party’s Position is even negative (though not
significantly so). Looking at the argumentations for the most unpopular positions more closely, we
see that indeed, parties apparently do not necessarily avoid being very ‘on topic’ on these issues. For
example, while 92% of the citizens agree with the statement that ‘Bringing rubbish to the recycling
park should cost nothing’, three out of six parties disagree with it, and they do not frame their
positions in terms of other issues at all. They simply state that they support the ‘polluter-pays
principle’. Thus, parties do not seem to take public opinion into account in their argumentations
The control variables in our model matter a lot. As expected, longer argumentations have a higher
change to contain words from other issues. The effect of Word Count is positive and significant. And,
many of the issue dummies (not reported in the table) are significant as well, indicating that parties
are more likely to frame their positions in terms of some issues than others. ‘Macro-economics’ is the
issue that is most often used to frame positions about other issues.
12
Table 4—Mixed effects logistic model explaining Word on Other Topic (fixed effects on issue level and crossed random effects on statement and party level)
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
Model 4
Coef.
S.E.
Coef.
S.E.
Coef.
S.E.
Coef.
S.E.
Explanatory variables
Issue-Ownership (H1)
7.80***
1.45
12.51***
2.20
7.47***
1.65
11.60***
2.61
Government Party (H2)
-.06
.09
-.08
.14
-.06
.11
-.09
.12
Salience of Statement Issue (H3)
-1.59*
.66
-1.08
.84
Unpopularity of Party’s Position (H4)
-.17
.22
-.39
.33
Controls
Word Count
.02***
.00
.02***
.00
.02***
.00
.02***
.00
Issue dummies
(not fully reported)
(not fully reported)
(not fully reported)
(not fully reported)
Constant
-3.61***
.19
-3.72***
.31
-3.33***
.24
-3.37***
.41
Total N
27,054
16,446
18,410
10,766
Number of statements
288
175
198
116
Number of parties
6
6
6
6
Number of issues
19
19
19
19
Variance (party)
.152
.092
.109
7.84e-7
Variance (statement)
.788
.791
.707
.827
Note: * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001
13
Figure 1—Predicted probabilities of Word on Other Topic (predictions based on Model 1, fixed effects
only, 95% confidence intervals, keeping other variables at their mean values)
Figure 2—Predicted probabilities of Word on Other Topic (predictions based on Model 2, fixed effects
only, 95% confidence intervals, keeping other variables at their mean values)
14
Conclusion & Discussion
In this paper, we set out to develop a model of party issue framing. Scholarly research has amply
demonstrated that parties are strategic in their communication. Considering issues, they can opt to
selectively (de)emphasize issues, thereby focusing on issues on which they hold strong reputations
(Budge & Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996). However, various recent studies have shown that parties tend
to converge on similar issues (Dolezal et al., 2014; Sigelman & Buell, 2004). Yet, even if they
emphasize the same issues overall, parties can still act strategically and try to frame the issue in
advantageous terms (e.g. Jerit, 2007). However, our understanding of how and why parties choose
some issue frames over others remains limited. In our study of how parties frame issues, we focused
on the extent to which they attempt to bring in other issues in their communication.
Our model included four determinants of party issue framing: firstly, we expected that parties’ issue
ownership would determine how parties frame issues. By and large, this expectation was confirmed:
we found that as parties’ ownership on an issue increased, so did the probability that they would
refer to it in their argumentation. This suggests that parties do leverage their dominance on these
issues: they hold stronger arguments on owned issues, and thus try to refer to these arguments if
they have to explain a position on another issue (Riker, 1993). Our second expectation, that parties
in government would be less inclined to frame their argumentation in terms of other issues, was not
confirmed. Though the results suggest that opposition parties diverge more, the difference with
government parties was non-significant. Thirdly, issue salience seems to matter as well, though the
evidence is less robust: as more voters consider an issue important, parties are less likely to include
other issues in their framing of the issue. In short, this suggests that parties are aware that they need
to address important issues directly, to avoid appearing as disconnected from the public’s concerns
(Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1994). Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, is our finding that the
popularity of a parties’ position on an issue does not affect issue framing. We expected that parties,
when having to argue an unpopular position, would try to discuss other issues. Yet, this was not the
case. This pattern was borne out both in the statistical models, but also when we examined the
argumentations for some of the most unpopular positions: parties basically ‘stood their ground’ and
simply explained – in terms of the proper issue – why they took the position.
Though we believe that our data has various strengths, most chiefly the fact that we can examine
how parties frame issues over a wide range of specific policy decisions, it also has several drawbacks.
Perhaps most importantly is the source of the data itself. We rely on the arguments provided by
parties for the construction of a Voting Advice Application (Cedroni & Garzia, 2010). Though such
applications usually enjoy high visibility and are used by many voters, it is likely that parties approach
such tools differently than other communication channels. Apart from positional agreement the
results suggest that parties’ strategy does conform to our expectation. However, we cannot simply
generalize these findings: for example, parties might be less likely to try and frame issues in terms of
owned issues when dealing with journalists, to avoid being called out for ‘dodging the issue’. Or, the
reverse might as well be true – they might be more likely to refer to owned issues, because this might
increase the chances that journalists would report it (Hayes, 2008). In short, though the results do
seem to suggest that parties’ are strategic in their argumentations to support VAA positions, future
research should assert whether our expectations also hold for different types of communication. A
second limitation is the fact that our model focuses on a single country. We tested our model in
Belgium, a country with a highly fragmented party system. It is unclear to what extent parties’
15
strategies in less crowded party systems would differ. The impact of unpopular positions, for
example, could not be confirmed. Yet, we only took overall public opinion into account: in a
fragmented party system, parties might be less concerned with overall public opinion, and focus on
their ‘niche’ in the electoral market. Conversely, in a two-party system the dynamics might be
different, with parties trying to cater to the median voter more ostensibly. Given the fact that similar
data exist – though not always available publicly – in multiple countries (Van Camp, Lefevere, &
Walgrave, 2014), it would be worthwhile to examine whether our findings hold in different party
systems as well. In a related note, we could not confirm the expectation that government parties’
strategies differ from those of opposition parties. Yet, this could also be contingent upon the nature
of the party system: Belgium, having a fragmented party system, has coalition governments. It is
likely that government parties are mainly inclined to stick to an issue if they hold the ministerial post
for that issue. Belgium is, however, particularly challenging in this regard: as Belgium is a federalized
state, it has both federal and regional governments, with some parties being in government at one
level and in the opposition at the other. Moreover, it is oftentimes difficult to assign specific policies
to a specific government level, as the specific competences related to an issue are often held by
multiple ministerial posts, which inhibits a clear test of the impact of ministerial posts on issue
framing.
Overall, the evidence we presented here suggests that parties’ issue framing, for the most part,
follows the expectations developed in our theoretical framework. This suggests that the extant
literature on parties’ strategic behavior can be applied to understand and predict how political elites
frame issues.
16
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