Conforming to the Dominant Discourse: Framing Distance and Multiparty Competition

Abstract

This study introduces a measure of framing distance, capturing the degree of frame overlap among parties. Additionally, it provides a causal mechanism explaining differences between parties in framing distance. Parties within PR systems have to take coalition considerations in their stride, and therefore mainstream opposition parties, which have previously governed, are unlikely to adopt large framing distances. Alternatively, challenger parties, those that have never governed, are likely to frame important issues differently. Nonetheless, challengers are expected to reduce their framing distance when performing well in election polls. Electoral success acts as a trigger for these parties to reconsider their goals (policy, office, or votes) and to become more office-seeking. These theoretical propositions are confirmed on the basis of the European integration issue, using a mixed methods approach. Pooled time-series regressions on party manifestos issued by 21 parties between 1987 and 2006 in three political systems (Germany, Netherlands, and UK) are complemented with case study analysis.

Acknowledgements

Previous drafts have been presented at the annual meeting of the Dutch and Flemish Political Science Associations in Ghent (30–31 May 2013) and at the ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux (4–7 September 2013). Many people have offered valuable comments on this work including Wouter van der Brug, Sarah de Lange, the participants in the aforementioned conferences and the anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to Catherine de Vries for generously sharing her dataset on party frames.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

11. A distance of 5 denotes the maximum discrepancy between the frame emphasis of the focal party and the other parties on each of the five frames. Theoretically, a maximum discrepancy on a particular frame would occur when a party mentions that frame in the context of each sub-issue regarding European integration while the competing parties never use it or, the other way around, when all parties mention the frame in all their statements regarding European integration while the focal party refrains from using it.

12. It is possible that differences between electoral systems only hold for particular types of parties and/or specific levels of electoral support. Yet additional analyses demonstrated that only MOPs in the UK majoritarian system adopt a significantly higher framing distance than their counterparts in the German and Dutch PR systems when electoral support in polls is below 37 per cent. Overall, this provides little evidence for H1.

13. Robustness analyses demonstrated that the results: (a) are not biased due to the fact that Dutch and German parties were pooled, (b) are robust against alternative operationalisations of the dependent variable, (c) hold if MOPs are reset to challenger status after having been excluded from office for 15 consecutive years, (d) hold if the salience a party attaches to the EU is controlled for, and (e) if an AR1 error structure is specified instead of a PSAR1 (see online appendix).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) [grant number NWO 432-08-130].