Laurent Bernhard

The Context of the Campaigns

Direct-democratic campaigns take place in an institutional and issue-specific context. Political institutions define the rules of the game of the direct- democratic process, and as such they are, as Sniderman (2000: 69) points out, the ‘organizers of political choices’. They organize the choices for political and media actors, and for voters. They do so by imposing constraints and opportunities on the communication strategies of the strategic actors, which, at the same time, pre-structure the fundamental options available to voters. It is very important to keep in mind that, in politics, ‘citizens are presented with an organized set, or menu, of choices’ (Sniderman and Bullock 2004: 338). Direct-democratic choices under contemporary conditions do not differ in this respect from electoral choices in representative democracies. The format of the choice is given, and so are the alternatives on the menu from which citizens can choose. In this chapter, we present the specific institutional context of Swiss direct-democratic campaigns, the general structuration of the choice by the overall make-up of the systems of interest intermediation (parties, interest associations and the media), as well as the specific context of the three campaigns which constitute the object of our study. We begin with the institutional setting, and then move on to the intermediary systems and to our three campaigns. For the presentation of the campaigns, we proceed in three steps. First, we briefly introduce the stakes and the coalitional configurations involved in the respective policy domains. Next, we discuss the political processes that, in each case, have preceded and pre-structured the issue-specific campaigns. Finally, we situate the three campaigns within the context of all direct-democratic campaigns that have taken place at the federal level since the early 1980s, in order to provide the reader with a general idea of their representativeness for Swiss direct-democratic campaigns.

The Charm of Salient Issues? Parties’ Strategic Behavior in Press Releases

During election campaigns political actors strategically choose issues to focus on. Besides highlighting issues over which a party exerts issue ownership, they may also engage with issues highly salient in the media. The present chapter analyses under which conditions parties prefer focusing on the issues they own, and in which cases they rather pay attention to issues on the media agenda. A content analysis of press releases and newspaper coverage in Switzerland, Germany, France and Great Britain during national election campaigns shows that issue ownership matters across countries and explains quite well the parties’ issue selection strategies. However, exogenous events like crisis, scandals or catastrophes motivate to follow up on news coverage, even at the cost of owned issues.

The Strategic Context

Any political choice and any campaign are embedded in a given context. As Walder (2006: 713) points out, ‘a theory about political choice — or any theory about politics — can be no more valid than its claims about the contexts within which these choices are made.’ The understanding of the political context is therefore of crucial importance. Since I am proposing to explore the strategies adopted by political actors in direct-democratic campaigns, I will account for the environmental characteristics of theses campaigns. Basically, direct-democratic campaigns consist of three aspects: the rules of the game, the battlefields, and the players. In other words, direct-democratic campaigns take place in institutional and issue-specific contexts, which are mediated by the political elites. Consequently, this chapter proceeds in three steps. First, I will present the direct-democratic context of Switzerland by focusing on both formal and informal rules. Second, I will turn to the general structuration of the choice by setting out the systems of interest intermediation (parties, interest associations) as well as the particular role played by the federal government. Third, I will explore the four issue-specific contexts (immigration, health politics, welfare state, and economic liberalism) in which the eight campaigns under scrutiny take place.

The Profiles of the Campaigns

After having highlighted the general direct-democratic context as well as the four policy-related settings in the previous section, I shall now provide an overview of the eight selected campaigns. After a brief description of the propositions’ origins, I will consider the specific pre-structuring of the choices by focusing on the preceding issue-specific debates and decisions in the government and in parliament. Subsequently, I will address the actors’ configuration which materializes in the formation of two opposing coalitions. I will then review the major events of the public campaigns. Finally, I will turn to the outcomes and the citizens’ opinion formation patterns.

Construction of the Frames

In this chapter we look at how political actors craft their messages in terms of framing. Frames are ‘central organizing ideas that provide coherence to a designated set of idea elements’ (Ferree et al. 2002: 105). A frame is like ‘a picture frame, it puts a border around something, distinguishing it from what is around it’; it is a ‘spotlight’ that attracts our attention to certain aspects of an issue, and directs it away from other aspects (Gamson 2004: 245). According to Entman’s (1993: 52) influential definition, to frame is to selectively emphasize/evaluate certain aspects of a perceived reality and to make them more salient, ‘in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’. In other words, to frame is to actively construct the meaning of the reality in question. For instance, in the case of capital punishment, the issue can be defined in terms of ‘innocence frame’ that accentuates imperfections in the justice system, or in terms of the ‘morality-based frame’ that focuses on the question whether it is right or wrong to kill when punishing (Dardis et al. 2008; Baumgartner et al. 2008). In strategic framing just as in any kind of strategic action, there are as Jasper (2006: 171) points out, ‘few rules... but many choices’.