The art of political reinvention
Political parties and politicians change positions regularly--and sometimes dramatically. Sage Journals explains how successful volte-faces employ clever techniques of reframing.
Political parties, which are confronted to shifting public opinion and/or changing1 party competition on a policy issue, face a dilemma. On the one hand, not changing their position on this particular issue might lead to voter loss. Since they do not represent an electorally viable position anymore, they risk losing support to another party, which holds a position that is closer to voters’ opinions on this issue. The empirical evidence shows that parties indeed move their position on issues as a response to public opinion shifts. On the other hand, however, shifting one’s position entails a risk of losing credibility (Meguid, 2005, 2008) because voters perceive the party to flip-flop according to the latest trends (Jones, 1994). Thus, the literature on party competition is ambiguous about the benefits of parties’ position shifts (Adams, 2012).
Insights from the political communication literature suggest that parties can avoid losing credibility by framing their new position differently than the one held previously. By shifting their framing of an issue from one frame (e.g., moral) to another (e.g., economic), parties might be able to advocate a different position without losing face.
Building on the work by Meyer and Wagner (2019), who analyze parties’ position shifts on the ideological left-right axis, this paper sets out to understand how parties shift their position on a given issue. Combining positional and framing approaches, it proposes a new model of parties’ position shifts and tests this model looking at Swiss parties’ position shifts on the migration issue over a period of 10 years. As expected, the results show that parties, when shifting their position on this issue, prefer to resort to shifting the emphasis of different frames instead of changing their opinion on the issue. These results question our understanding of parties’ strategies when competing on issues, and call for a more thorough investigation of how these different strategies affect voters’ opinions.
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