Changing Positions without Losing Face. How Parties Shift their Issue Positions

• In Event: Cross-national Perspectives on Party Press Releases

Abstract

Recent developments in European politics have brought important changes to parties’ issue competition. The rising importance of the migration issue has forced parties to either clarify or shift their positions on this matter. In doing so, parties face a dilemma: while ignoring ongoing changes in rival parties’ rhetoric and public opinion could lead to electoral losses, position shifts on a salient issue might be perceived as “flip-flopping” which could alienate the party’s core supporters. The question arises as to how parties proceed when shifting their issue positions. Building on work by Meyer and Wagner (2017), who analyze parties’ emphasis-based and opinion-based position shifts, I propose a model combining positional and framing approaches in order to understand how parties can shift their position on a specific issue without “losing face”. The empirical analysis of rhetoric-based estimates of party strategies draws upon a corpus of 8790 press releases issued by Swiss parties between 2007 and 2016. The results show that, on average, parties prefer to change their framing of the migration issue instead of shifting their position per se. Rather than changing their position on the issue in an obvious manner, parties try to draw the public’s attention towards another set of arguments that allows for a different position. Rival parties’ behavior, public opinion and party characteristics further influence parties’ strategies.

Author

• Alexandra Feddersen, University of Fribourg, Switzerland