This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy-edited version of the following article: Anke Tresch & Alexandra Feddersen (2018). The (in)stability of voters' perceptions of competence and associate issue ownership: The role of media coverage. Political

This contribution analyzes the public discourse on foreigners and Muslims in Switzerland between 2000 and 2009. In Switzerland, as elsewhere in Europe, the Muslim minority has emerged as the main concern for integration in public discourse. What makes Muslims special in the debate on immigration and integration? How does the public discourse on Muslims differ from the portrayal of foreigners in general? A quantitative content analysis of four Swiss newspapers was conducted covering three direct democratic campaigns. While the demographic composition of the Muslim minority has not changed substantially, the way Muslims are perceived in public discourse did. Certain ethnic groups, which are still categorized as foreigners in 2000, are mainly assigned to the Muslim minority in 2009. The latter is seen as a relatively homogeneous group raising other issues than foreigners. These results should lead to question the current academic and political debate on integration in Switzerland.

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Parties face a dilemma when confronted with shifting public opinion or changing rival parties’ issue positions: while ignoring ongoing changes could lead to electoral losses, position shifts on a salient issue might be perceived as flip- flopping and alienate supporters. This paper proposes 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 on the issue of migration. The results show that parties, rather than bluntly shifting their opinion on the issue, prefer to draw the public’s attention toward another set of frames that allows for a different position. These results have important implications for our understanding of parties’ competition on issues, as well as for the literature on mass-elite linkages.

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