Issue Ownership Theory Research Articles

The appeals in women contestants’ campaign slogans during the 2017 general elections in Kenya

Women have made notable political gains globally, evidenced by the number of elected women. In Kenya, though the current number of elected women in parliament, senate and governor position is the highest it has ever been, women contestants still face a number of challenges during their political campaigns. To strategically position themselves during campaigns, women have to use slogans that appeal to the Kenyan electorate in the different parts of the country. This qualitative study, anchored on the theory of gender issue ownership, focusses on the campaign slogans that women running for parliament, senate and governor positions used during the 2017 general elections in the country. Data was collected from online sources-contestants’ Facebook pages and groups, websites etc. and thematically analysed. Findings showed that the slogans appealed to motherhood qualities, a sense of community, credible leadership, and to musicality. The study helps to further understand women's political campaigns in Kenya and other related contexts.

Socially mediated issue ownership

Abstract Given the growing importance of issue competition and the growing use of social media during elections, this study seeks to create a better understanding of how issue dynamics relating to political parties play out on social media. It tests whether issue ownership theory can explain how parties and issues are being discussed on Twitter and to what extent a mediated form of issue ownership aligns with citizens’ perceptions of issue ownership. The results indicate that perceptions of issue ownership as measured in representative surveys correlate with variations of what issues parties are linked with on Twitter. Some deviations also emerged, which possibly reflect short-term changes in parties’ issue competition. Understanding how issue ownership mediates through social media platforms is important in order to evaluate the role of social media in contemporary opinion forming processes and sheds light on the issue competition among political parties in online fora.

The Accessibility and Electoral Consequences of Issue Competence Perceptions: Evidence from the Swiss 2019 Election

AbstractAccording 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 voters' ownership perceptions, as measured by response latencies. Through individual‐level analyses of voting in the 2019 Swiss federal election, we demonstrate that the effect of voters' issue ownership perceptions on their voting decisions is strongest when their ownership attributions are highly accessible and when the issue at stake is considered important. Our results also reveal that the effects of accessibility are largely driven by voting decisions for parties that own the issue in the eyes of a large part of the electorate, such as the Greens in the case of the environment.

Im Schatten von Covid-19: Thematisierungsstrategien der Parteien in der Bundestagswahl 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences had a significant impact on the social, politi- cal, ecological, and economic life over the past nearly two years . How the political parties’ handled the Covid-19 crisis was therefore also said to have significantly influenced the 2021 federal elections in Germany-not least because of the strong focus on the pandemic during the election campaign . Based on fundamental assumptions of saliency theory, issue ownership theory, and issue framing, the issue competition strategies of political parties represented in the German Bundestag during the 19th electoral period regarding the Cov- id-19 pandemic are examined . For this purpose, it is analyzed how important it was pro- grammatically for the Bundestag elections in 2021 by means of content- and frequency- analytical methods, focusing in particular on party-specific differences and commonalities with regard to thematization strategies . The results show that in the 2021 federal election programs, the Covid-19 pandemic was an important valence-issue and that the established parties prioritized Covid-19 issues in areas of their own issue ownership . The Covid-19 crisis is apparently not only to be understood as a valence issue but also as a positional issue - an aspect that future work could take up and examine in more detail .

Effects of Issue Ownership, Perceived Fit, and Authenticity in Corporate Social Advocacy on Corporate Reputation

Based on the issue ownership theory and corporate reputation, this study examines the effect of corporate social advocacy (CSA) on corporate reputation, focusing on the relative impact of perceived fit between CSA and brand identity (CSA-brand fit) and CSA authenticity. To this end, this study first examined how Ben & Jerry’s advocacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights through social media channels has influenced the assessment of issue ownership by comparing social analytics data with public survey data. Spearman’s rank-order correlation revealed a high correlation between the salience of Ben & Jerry’s LGBTQ-related social media posts and its top-of-mind ranking within the ten companies associated with the LGBTQ rights issue. Results of survey data showed the relative impacts of CSA-brand fit and authenticity on Ben & Jerry’s issue-specific corporate reputation. Consistent with the predictions, both perceived authenticity and perceived fit turned out to be positive predictors for corporate reputation. Between the two theory-driven variables, perceived authenticity was the strongest predictor for corporate reputation.

Ballots, bombs, and bullets: the effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks on electoral behavior

ABSTRACT The attitudinal effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks are well documented, but their electoral consequences have not been studied systematically in the American context. We derive a set of expectations about mass violence and electoral behavior from terror management theory and issue ownership theory. We then examine the effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks on United States presidential elections from 1976 through 2016. We find mass shootings increase turnout in the counties where they occur. Furthermore, terrorist attacks reduce the Democratic presidential candidate's shares of the two-party vote at the county level. Both of these effects decay sharply as the time between the event and Election Day increases. These findings illustrate the power of mass violence to influence American electoral behavior, conditional on the type of violent event and its proximity to Election Day.

Presidential Elections 2018: The Struggle of Putin and Navalny for a Media Agenda

ABSTRACT The study compares the networked issue agendas of Vladimir Putin and Alexey Navalny in Russian mainstream media and on the Internet utilizing the theoretical framework of issue ownership theory. We analyze the period from December 12, 2016 to December 12, 2017. The analysis shows that the issue agendas of Putin and Navalny are similar in the mainstream media and on the Internet. In both media types, Putin is often mentioned in connection with economic issues and international relations, which attract the attention of the population and are perceived as important. Navalny is associated with the issues of civic activism, NGOs and anti-corruption.

Shifting Welfare Policy Positions: The Impact of Radical Right Populist Party Success Beyond Migration Politics

ABSTRACT Political parties respond strategically to the electoral success of radical right populist parties (RRPPs). While previous research has focused on programmatic responses on cultural conflict issues, we are expanding the research on policy position adaption to the economic left-right issue of welfare-state politics. Actual and potential supporters of RRPPs do not only feel threatened by migration or liberal conceptions of society but are also often confronted with real or perceived socio-economic decline. Therefore, we argue that established parties do not only react by changing their socio-cultural policy offers but also by adjusting their welfare state policy positions. Based on parties' voter potentials and issue ownership theory, we investigate whether such changes are especially pronounced for left-of-center parties. Analysing data from 18 West European countries since 1985, we find that non-RRPPs indeed advocate more leftist positions on welfare state policies in response to increasing electoral support for RRPPs. This effect is especially pronounced for economically left-of-centre parties as these parties might consider this to be a promising strategy to win back voters from the populist radical right.

Issue Ownership and Strategic Policy Choice in Multiparty Africa

While it is widely believed that democratic institutions are more responsive to citizens’ policy needs and interests, there has been little effort to examine how multiparty competition in consolidating democracies affects policy choices among competing economic interests. The questions of whether and how democracy influences such policy decisions tend to be ignored because many presume constituents in developing countries are only sensitive to relatively direct exchanges of favors for votes, such as distribution of clientelistic benefits or local/club goods. In this study, I examine some nationally important economic (sub)sectors whose policies favor some parts of the economy over others, targeting investment, taxes, and subsidies, trade protections, or regulation. Applying issue ownership theory to two cases—Ghana and Kenya—I find that partisan competition leads incumbent governments to pursue policies that help ensure economic gains to their electoral supporters at the expense of the opposition backers’ interests.Related ArticlesKostadinova, Tatiana, and Petia Kostadinova. 2016. “Party Promises, Voter Understanding, and Mandate Responsiveness in East European Politics.” Politics & Policy 44 (1): 5‐34. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12145Pelizzo, Riccardo, and Zim Nwokora. 2016. “Bridging the Divide: Measuring Party System Change and Classifying Party Systems.” Politics & Policy 44 (6): 1017‐1052. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12188Pelizzo, Riccardo, and Zim Nwokora. 2018. “Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa.” Politics & Policy 46 (3): 505‐528. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12255

Issue ownership cues and candidate support

Issue ownership theory suggests that candidates should focus on the issues that are owned by—or associated with—their parties and mostly avoid issues that are owned by the opposing party. Doing so allows them to focus on their own party’s strengths rather than on their weaknesses. Despite this expectation, contemporary research finds that candidates discuss both their own party’s issues and trespass by talking about issues owned by the opposing parties. I argue that issue ownership cues—subtle information cues linking candidates to parties through the discussion of party-owned issues—should have heterogeneous effects across partisan groups. Using a survey experiment, I show that copartisans prefer candidates who focus on issues owned by their parties while opposing partisans prefer candidates who trespass; independents’ preferences do not appear to shift in response to these cues. It thus appears as if cuing people to connect candidates to one party or the other can inform citizens’ levels of support for those candidates. Depending on the composition of the electorate, trespassing can be an advantageous strategy for candidates.

Partisan Patriotism in the American Presidency: American Exceptionalism, Issue Ownership, and the Age of Trump

This study employs issue ownership theory to examine the partisan dynamics surrounding the idea of American exceptionalism in presidential discourse. We conducted a content analysis of invocations of American exceptionalism in all major U.S. presidential addresses—domestic and foreign—from the end of World War II through Trump’s 1st year in office. We find that even though Republicans have traditionally claimed ownership of American exceptionalism, patterns in presidential discourse tell a very different story. Specifically, our results show (a) in domestic contexts, Republican and Democratic presidents were very similar in their invocations of American exceptionalism during the Cold War but that Democrats have held a substantial advantage over Republicans throughout the post–Cold War era, including on issue areas that Republicans are perceived to “own” (e.g. national security); (b) in foreign contexts, Democrats have been much more outspoken in their embrace of American exceptionalism throughout both the Cold War and post–Cold War; and (c) President Trump has diverged significantly, both in substance and frequency, from his Democratic and Republican predecessors in his invocation of American exceptionalism. We reflect on the implications of these findings on our broader understanding of issue—and trait—ownership, presidential discourse, and American exceptionalism in American politics.

Presidential Elections 2018: The Struggle of Putin and Navalny for a Media Agenda

The study analyzes the construction of the network links of Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny with various issues of Russian public discussion in the national print media. The theoretical framework is issue ownership theory, according to which political actors have a range of issues that are most strongly associated with them. Ownership by the politician of topics that are perceived as important in the society determines his popularity among the population. In this study, we use the Integrum database, which contains extensive print media archives of approximately 500 Russian magazines and more than 250 national newspapers. We analyze the period from 12.12.2016 to 12.12.2017, i.е., one year after Alexey Navalny's announcement of his intention to participate in the presidential election in 2018. The analysis shows that Putin has more opportunities to form an agenda, as he attracts much more attention from national media than Navalny does. Putin is often mentioned in connection with economic issues and international relations, which attract the attention of the population and are perceived as important, while his activity in these spheres is perceived as successful. Navalny is associated with the issues of corruption, NGOs and civic activism. Corruption is an important topic for Russians, but the low attention of the media to Navalny does not allow him to gain the maximum benefit from owning this story.

Issue ownership in the 2016 presidential debates

ABSTRACTPolitical debates are a firmly established component of contemporary election campaigns. Issue Ownership Theory provides a framework for exploring the issues emphasized in election campaign messages including debates. He argues that the two major political parties have developed reputations for being better able to handle different sets of issues (issue ownership). For example, more people believe that Democrats are better able to deal with environmental issues than Republicans; and the Grand Old Party (GOP) is thought by more citizens to be better able to handle foreign policy issues. Petrocik argues that presidential candidates are prone to stress issues owned by their own political party more than opposing party candidates emphasizing those issues (so, Democrats discuss Democratic issues more – and Republican issues less – than Republicans). This study tests the Issue Ownership Theory with the 2016 presidential primary and general campaign debates. The data from both primary and general debates support the Issue Ownership predictions.

Breaking a habit: The impact of health on turnout and party choice

Turnout and party choice are widely held to be habitual, but little attention has been paid to factors that disrupt the pattern. Good health is an important determinant of political behaviour and a key component in the quality of life. Based on the developmental theory of turnout, we hypothesize that declining health lowers voting propensity over the life course. We employ issue ownership theory to assume that declining health increases the likelihood of voting for leftist parties. Using the British Household Panel Survey data, we show how deteriorating health significantly lowers the propensity to vote, but if a person in poor health votes, she is more likely to support Labour than the Conservatives. As expected by the developmental theory, major life events, such as declining health, affect voting propensity. Results also support issue ownership theory: declining health increases Labour voting which implies that British voters turn to the party that owns the health issue when the issue becomes salient.

To whom does the agenda belong? Review of issue ownership theory

The article systematizes the main provisions of issue ownership theory. This theory states that politicians and parties closely associated with the most topical issues and perceived by the public as capable of solving the problems receive greater public support. This theory has gained popularity in recent years. However, researchers still disagree over the definition of issue ownership and its measurement. The stability of the phenomenon over time as well as its applications not only to political parties but for individual politicians is still under discussion. Researchers distinguish two types of issue ownership: competence (confidence in the ability of a political actor to solve problem) and associative ownership (spontaneous identification of a political actor with an issue). Each of these «forms of ownership» is measured using various questions. This makes it more difficult to compare research results through the lens of this theory. Issue ownership plays a significant role in the political struggle and can contribute to the victory of the candidate (or party) in elections. This situation stimulates politicians to «capture» the most advantageous issues. However, political actors have unequal opportunities for that. The advantage is enjoyed by parties currently in power. In addition, the effect of issue ownership can be different for the authorities and the opposition. The opposition benefits from the media attention to the opposition-related issues but does not lose significantly due to active discussion of the issues that the ruling party owns. Meanwhile, the ruling parties lose their votes when the news media cover the issues owned by the opposition and do not gain much from the attention to the issues they own.

Does Government Support Respond to Governments’ Social Welfare Rhetoric or their Spending? An Analysis of Government Support in Britain, Spain and the United States

Issue ownership theory posits that when social welfare is electorally salient, left-wing parties gain public support by rhetorically emphasizing social welfare issues. There is less research, however, on whether left-wing governing parties benefit from increasing social welfare spending. That is, it is not known whether leftist governments gain from acting on the issues they rhetorically emphasize. This article presents arguments that voters will not react to governments’ social welfare rhetoric, and reviews the conflicting arguments about how government support responds to social welfare spending. It then reports time-series, cross-sectional analyses of data on government support, governments’ social welfare rhetoric and social welfare spending from Britain, Spain and the United States, that support the prediction that government rhetoric has no effects. The article estimates, however, that increased social welfare spending sharply depresses support for both left- and right-wing governments. These findings highlight a strategic dilemma for left-wing governments, which lose public support when they act on their social welfare rhetoric by increasing welfare spending.

Communicating on electoral platforms

This paper proposes an analysis of strategic communication on platforms by candidates during an electoral campaign. A candidate's platform in a (possibly) multidimensional policy space is fixed, but is imperfectly known by voters. A candidate strategically decides the emphasis he puts on the various issues, and thus the precision of the information he conveys to voters on his position on each issue. We show that if voters are fully rational, then all the relevant information is revealed at equilibrium, whatever the candidate's true position. We then study a model of boundedly rational voters, who take at face value the messages sent by the politicians, without being able to decipher their strategies. If voters are boundedly rational in this sense, a politician will not transmit all the relevant information; his communication strategy will depend on both the prior in the electorate and his true positions (unknown to the electorate). In particular, we show that candidates address all issues with positive probability, but tend to talk more often on issues on which they are a priori congruent with the representative voter, thereby providing a “nuanced” version of Petrocik's “issue ownership theory”.

How parties’ issue emphasis strategies vary across communication channels: The 2009 regional election campaign in Belgium

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 several factors to account for this behavior, but has mostly neglected that issue emphasis strategies can vary across campaign communication channels and parties. Based on a quantitative content analysis of the manifestos and press releases of all seven parties competing in the 2009 regional elections in Flanders (Belgium), we make two contributions. First, we show that while there is some consistency in parties’ issue priorities, they do not necessarily set the same issue priorities in their different campaign communication channels. Second, it appears that parties follow different strategies depending on their standing in the polls, and, to a lesser degree, according to their position in government or in opposition.

Priming, Issue Ownership, and Party Support: The Electoral Gains of an Issue-Friendly Media Agenda

Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns.” We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple parties and issues. The results provide support for the basic electoral implication of issue ownership theory, showing that increased media attention to owned issues increases support for the issue owners. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the effect of the ownership mechanism materializes differently for opposition and government parties. Opposition parties benefit from media attention to owned issues without losing ground when news concentrates on issues owned by government parties, while government parties, always struggling with the electoral cost of ruling, lose votes when news about opposition-owned issues increases without gaining support when the media agenda is “issue-friendly.”

Social democratic austerity: the conditional role of agenda dynamics and issue ownership

ABSTRACTOver the past 30 years, left-wing parties have increasingly abandoned the interests of their core constituency to embark on a right-wing journey of fiscal austerity. I argue that the changing partisan pattern in fiscal policy can in part be explained by analysing social democrats’ need to signal fiscal competence. Drawing on issue ownership theory, my starting point is that voters perceive the Right as better able to balance the budgets than the Left. This leads left-wing incumbents to compensate for their bad fiscal reputation when concerns about balanced budgets are salient in the political system. They do so by reducing spending and budget deficits as much or even more than right-wing governments. In this way, an asymmetric fiscal reputation makes partisan differences in fiscal policy disappear. Support for my claims is found estimating a set of error correction models with data from 21 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1980 and 2006.