Issue ownership theory is a fast-growing field in political research. Still, scholars disagree on the origins of individual issue ownership perceptions. Classical issue ownership theory states that individual party competence evaluation stems from a party’s “history of attention” on a given issue (e.g. Petrocik 1996). Critics argue that party competence evaluation is little more than party identification. We investigate to what extent party identification and parties’ attention to a specific issue explain individual issue ownership perceptions. Drawing on data from post-electoral studies and on the Manifesto Project Database, we conduct multilevel analyses to test the influence of both individual and party-level factors on voters’ competence evaluations and test our model for the U.S. and Western Europe. The results show that issue ownership derives from individual as well as party-level factors. Thus, viewing party competence evaluations as a mere expression of party ties is too simplistic.
