Anke Tresch

University of Lausanne | UNIL · Institut d'études politiques (IEP)

This paper complements earlier work about incentive effects in wave 5 of the Panel Survey of the Swiss Election Study (Selects) about the possibilities to decrease incentives for high estimated response propensity respondents. In the present paper, we study possibilities to decrease incentives in wave 6 for the complementary group, the low-propensi...

Little is known about the trade-off between response rates and sample selection on the one hand and costs of different incentives on the other hand in mature online panel surveys. In wave 5 of the Panel Survey of the Swiss Election Study (Selects), a conditional CHF 20 (cash) is used for the politically least interested, while the remaining sample...

Party–group relations are today characterized by various forms of alignments. These include the persistence of traditional class alignments, the realignment of economic groups due to identity politics and alignments of groups at the centre of identity politics. This study analyses the group-based messaging of parties in relation to these three grou...

This Special Issue brings together a large variety of contributions dealing with the influence of issues and issue competition, the structure of attitudes towards immigration and international cooperation and a series of non-policy factors such as campaign consultants and the rise of female representation in Switzerland. In this introduction we pla...

To what extent are negative election campaigns “tailored” to the personality of the candidates? And with what electoral consequences? In this article we tackle these questions by focusing on the 2019 Swiss federal election. We estimate the presence of negativity as a function of the personality profile of competing candidates (Big Five) and the pre...

To what extent are negative election campaigns “tailored” to the personality of the candidates? And with what electoral consequences? In this article we tackle these questions by focusing on the 2019 Swiss federal election. We estimate the presence of negativity as a function of the personality profile of competing candidates (Big Five) and the pre...

According to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters cast their ballot for the party that they consider to be most competent and most committed to handle an issue of importance to them. This article offers a theoretical expansion of this model, arguing that the effect of issue ownership on vote choice is conditioned by the accessibility of vot...

A growing body of studies shows that the reasons for competing candidates to “go negative” on their opponents during elections—that is, attacking their opponents instead of promoting their own programs or ideas stem from strategic considerations. Yet, existing research has, at this stage, failed to assess whether candidates’ personality traits also...

This paper analyzes the mutual influence between media and political agendas in the Netherlands and Switzerland. While these two countries share a number of similarities, they also exhibit some important differences (e.g. the frequency of parliamentary meetings) that are likely to affect the patterns of influence. Time-series cross-section analyses...

We investigate the impact of three issue-related party perceptions on people's vote choices. The positional dimension of issue voting holds that voters are more likely to prefer parties whose policy positions on issues come close to their own policy preferences. The competence dimension of issue voting implies that voters are more inclined to cast...

This chapter describes the Swiss political system and adopts an issue attention approach to explore one of its defining institutions: direct democracy. By means of referenda and popular initiatives, voters regularly decide on the continuity and change of policies. Welfare and education (27%) and environment, energy, and transportation (21%) account...

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. Th...

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and ideologically biased media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By comb...

The personalization of election campaigning is often identified as an integral part in the worldwide process towards the professionalization of political campaigns (e.g., Farrell & Webb, 2000). Yet, much of the empirical literature is rather descriptive and focused on the prominence of party leaders in "free" media coverage (e.g., Holtz-Bacha, Lang...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy-makers is contingent on the type of issues, media, and political agendas. This article contributes to this literature by elaborating on a factor that has been surprisingly neglected so far: the domestic or Europeanized character of t...

Issue ownership theory expects political parties to focus their campaigns on ‘owned’ issues for which they have a reputation of competence and a history of attention, and to avoid issues that play to the advantage of their opponents. However, recent empirical studies show that parties often campaign on the same issues. The literature has suggested...

The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the...

Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability t...

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have...

Issue ownership means that some parties are considered by the public at large as being more able to deal with, or more attentive to, certain issues. The theory has been used to explain both party behaviour – parties are expected to focus on owned issues – and voter behaviour – when a voter considers a party to own an issue, this affects the odds of...

Campaigns raise public interest in politics and allow parties to convey their messages to voters. However, voters’ exposure and attention during campaigns are biased towards parties and candidates they like. This hinders parties’ ability to reach new voters. This paper theorises and empirically tests a simple way in which parties can break partisan...

Although issue ownership theory – the idea that voters consider specific parties to be better able to deal with some issues – had already emerged in the 1980s, it is only in the past 10 years that the theory has gained prominence in the study of voter and party behaviour. Despite the steep increase in scholarly attention, there is still no consensu...

Whereas extant work on issue ownership treats voters’ issue ownership perceptions as independent variables to explain electoral choice or party behaviour, this article examines whether parties can, by communicating on an issue, turn voters' perceptions of issue ownership to their advantage. In contrast to most previous studies that have focused on...

Europeanization challenges national democratic systems. As part and parcel of the broader internationalization of politics, Europeanization is associated with a shift from policymaking within majoritarian, elected representative bodies towards technocratic decisions among non-majoritarian and non-elected bodies (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2008, Lav...

Outside lobbying is a key strategy for social movements, interest groups and political parties for mobilising public opinion through the media in order to pressure policymakers and influence the policymaking process. Relying on semi-structured interviews and newspaper content analysis in six Western European countries, this article examines the use...

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party “owns” the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. Howev...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy makers is contingent on the type of issue, media, and political agenda. This article contends that the relationship between media and political agendas varies across the phases of the decision-making process. Based on a comprehensive...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the EU has been increasingly criticised for its democratic deficit, which is intrinsically linked to the absence of a public sphere at the European level. Whereas scholars consider the emergence of such a public sphere as a necessary requirement for the democratisation of the EU, they disagree on the conceptualisat...

This article analyzes the role of the press in direct democratic campaigns. The paper argues the press has a dual role: On news pages, newspapers ought to inform citizens about the issue positions and frames of the pro and con camps in a balanced way. In editorials, newspapers act as political advocates that promote their own issue frames and try t...

Issue ownership is commonly conceptualized as multidimensional, consisting of a “competence” dimension and an “associative” dimension. Because existing operationalizations of issue ownership tap only the former dimension, we focus on associative issue ownership: the spontaneous identification between specific issues and specific parties in the mind...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy makers is contingent on the type of issue, media, and political agenda. This article contends that the relationship between media and political agendas varies across the phases of the decision-making process. Based on a comprehensive...

The purpose of this article is to analyse the conditions under which referendum campaigns have an impact on voting choices. Based on a model of opinion formation that integrates both campaign effects and partisan effects, we argue that campaign effects vary according to the context of the popular vote (size and type of conflict among the party elit...

Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue s...

This book investigates an important source of the European Union's recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe's 'democratic deficit...

This book investigates an important source of the European Union's recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe's 'democratic deficit...

It is well known that party contestation over European integration and the European Union produces strange bedfellows, bringing together those who, as one activist candidly put it, “would not want to be seen dead in the same coffin” (Forster 2002, p. 60). Criticisms of Europe often come from the left and right poles, whereas center parties suspend...

This article employs a unique data set — covering 25 popular votes on foreign, European and immigration/asylum policy held between 1992 and 2006 in Switzerland — in order to examine the conditional impact of context upon utilitarian, cultural, political and cognitive determinants of individual attitudes toward international openness. Our results re...

Starting from theories of secularization and of religious individualization, we propose a two-dimensional typology of religiosity and test its impact on political attitudes. Unlike classic conceptions of religiosity used in political studies, our typology simultaneously accounts for an individual's sense of belonging to the church (institutional di...

In times of increasing “mediatization” of politics, when voters and their elected representatives primarily communicate through the media, the question of who gets into the news and why becomes of the utmost importance. This article examines the determinants of Swiss legislators' presence and prominence in the print media by focusing on three compe...

As a result of the Europeanization of politics and the increasing role of the public sphere, political actors in Western Europe are currently facing a double strategic challenge. Based on data from seven West European countries and the European Union, the authors analyze how state actors, political parties, interest groups, and social movement orga...

Cet article vise à expliquer les variations inter-cantonales du succès des autorités ainsi que du soutien populaire qui leur est accordé en votation fédérale entre 1971 et 1999. A cette fin, l'auteur cherche à intégrer deux courants de recherches dans un cadre d'analyse unique en déterminant l'impact respectif des mots d'ordre des partis politiques...

Analyse quantitative du résultat des votations fédérales suisses du 7 février 2003: votes populaires sur l'extention de la démocratie directe (introduction au niveau fédéral de l'initiative légisislative générale) et sur la réforme de la participation cantonale au financement des coûts hospitaliers.

URL : http://www.polittrends.ch/abstimmungen/abstimmungsanalysen/vox-analysen/020206f.html

The aim of this paper is to explore the characteristics of media data when we measure party positions and issue salience. We thereby contribute in developing new methodologies to analyze political parties and in operationalizing new theoreti-cal models of political competition. Following other studies that have compared in-dicators based on differe...

According to the theory of "outside lobbying" (Kollman 1998), media access is a key resource for intermediate actors such as interest groups, SMOs or political actors to mobilize public opinion, pressure powerholders and exert indirect influence in public policymaking. However, media presence is known to be highly unequally distributed and biased t...