Issue ownership theory expects political parties to focus their campaigns on “owned” issues, for which they hold a reputation of competence, and to avoid issues that play to the advantage of their opponents. Recent studies from the bipartisan US context show that parties, more often than not, campaign on the same issues. Evidence from multiparty European countries is rare, but points in the same direction. However, we lack knowledge about which pairs of parties contend each other’s issues, to what extent, how and when. Based on electoral manifestos and press releases of all parties competing in the 2009 regional elections in Flanders, we assess three hypotheses: 1) “issue convergence” mostly takes place between ideologically proximate parties; 2) parties pay more attention to unowned issues towards the end of the campaign; 3) parties’ strategies vary across communication channels: parties focus much more on owned issues in manifestos than in press releases.
