Against today's escalating global crises, political parties are increasingly pushed to address complex issues, especially those they'd rather avoid. This book analyzes how political parties communicate about controversial topics like migration in Western democracies.

Integrating insights from diverse literature on party competition and political communication, this book offers an original theoretical framework to examine how parties handle issues not typically associated with them. Focusing on more than a decade of party communication on migration in Switzerland, the book shows how rivals, public opinion, and contextual factors like immigration rates influence party strategies.

Using a unique dataset of political parties' press releases and interviews with party officials, the book demonstrates that parties compete on salience, position, and framing of uncomfortable issues. It provides valuable insights into the complexities of party competition and communication strategies and appeals to scholars, students, and researchers of political and communication science in general, and political communication, electoral studies, and media studies in particular, as well as practitioners seeking a better understanding of the communication of political parties in Western democracies. 

Alexandra Feddersen is a Professor of Political Communication and Media at the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She studied political science at the University of Geneva, spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of California Davis, and worked at the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the communication strategies of political parties, the influence of public opinion on the communication of political actors, and the perception of political messages by the public. She contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Swiss Politics and her work is published in several high-ranking academic journals such as Electoral Studies, Political Communication, and Party Politics.