Short‐Term Dynamics in Issue Ownership and Electoral Choice Formation

Our paper captures the influence of political advertisements on vote intentions in the framework of the 2015 parliamentary elections. We focus on the two winning parties, the FDP and SVP, and the promotion of their stances on immigration/asylum, relations to the EU and the economy. We make use of an extensive database on political advertisements collected in 50 important national and regional newspapers that we link to the Selects respondents. Our findings only hint at limited effects of issue-specific advertisements with regard to the activation of latent preferences, suggesting that campaigns mattered more when they have managed to make a party's issue positions known to the electorate. The general reinforcement tendencies detected for migration ads of the SVP suggest that reinforcement effects might be particularly prone when highly contentious issues are at stake. Our results indicate that the SVP did not manage to mobilize new voters with their political advertisements.

mentioning

confidence: 87%

Effects of Issue‐Specific Political Advertisements in the 2015 Parliamentary Elections of Switzerland

Zumofen

Gerber

2018

“…Findings show that parties rely on their ownership to select the issue on which they focus their attention (Klüver & Spoon, 2014; Wagner & Meyer, 2014). While some scholars argue that the individual perception of competence can change and issue ownership thus be dynamic (Damore, 2004; Petitpas & Sciarini, 2018; Walgrave et al, 2009), issue ownership is stable at the aggregate level (Seeberg, 2017). Therefore, issue ownership as a factor that influences parties' issue emphasis is also stable.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hit the right target! The Role of Issue Saliency among a Party's Potential Voters as a Determinant of the Party's Issue Emphasis in Switzerland

Borgeat

2022

Issues matter in party competition. Therefore, the issue emphasis strategy of parties plays an important role during a campaign. Scholars disagree about the factors that explain strategies. Some argue that parties “ride‐the‐wave” and emphasize issues that are important for the public. Others argue that parties care about the issue priorities of their voters. Between these two theories, I argue that parties care about their potential voters, which means that issue priorities among potential voters have an impact on the issue emphasis of parties. The more important an issue is among this group, the more a party will emphasize this issue. To test this hypothesis, I use the panel survey of the Swiss Election Study Selects and the Année Politique Suisse data on newspaper ads. The findings from a multilevel zero‐inflated negative binomial regression suggest that the issue saliency among the potential voters has a positive impact on the issue emphasis of parties.

“…Wüest ( 2018 ) links the Selects voter surveys to the media analysis to assess the influence of the information environment on voters’ perceptions of the most important political problems. Kurella and Rosset ( 2018 ) integrate information from the candidate survey to their analysis of the post‐election survey while Petitpas and Sciarini ( 2018 ) fully exploit the three waves of the panel survey to study the short‐term changes in the way voters evaluate the competences of parties on specific issues. Other contributions link the Selects data with external data sources.…”

Section: Methodological Innovations In the Study Of Swiss Electoral Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is the case for example for the relations between Switzerland and the European Union (see Emmenegger et al. 2018 ) and citizens’ perceptions of party competence on five salience issues (see Petitpas and Sciarini 2018 ) . Innovative approaches coming from political psychology could also find their way into Selects thanks to the inclusion of some questions on the personality traits of voters (see Ackermann et al.…”

Section: Thematic Contributions Of This Special Issue To the Study Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the Special Issue “The 2015 Swiss National Elections”

Giger

Rennwald

Tresch

2018

This special issue brings together a large variety of contributions dealing with party choice, political attitudes and the dynamics of electoral campaigns in Switzerland. The introduction places the contributions in the broader framework of current debates in the international literature and highlights substantial and methodological innovations. The articles in this volume address central issues of the literature dealing with the two-dimensional structure of political competition, take up key questions of the dynamics of election campaigns, and finally echo a large interest for the topic of populism, not only on the side of the parties but also on the side of the voters. The introduction also underlines the new and innovative ways in which the articles link the different datasets together in order to address substantial questions on the complexity of the environment in which voters form their choice and political parties operate during an election campaign. Patrick Emmenegger, Romain Lachat, Simon Lanz, Pascal Sciarini and Denise Traber. Second, we highly value the smooth and efficient collaboration with the editorial office of the Swiss Political Science Review, Thomas Widmer and Daniela Eberli in particular. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers of the special issue who did a tremendous job in making the contributions even better. Last but not least, we would like to thank the Selects team at FORS for the preparation and online publication of the data -without them this Special Issue would not be possible.