Measuring Voters' Party-Issue Linkages in Parliamentary Elections

A great deal of research has established the idea that issue ownership systematically structures how parties compete on issues. However, it is unclear how voters respond to the linkages parties intend to create between themselves and certain issues. This paper applies a Downsian-type model of vote choice in a multiparty and multi-dimensional competition setting to measure these party-issue linkages without explicitly asking voters for that link. Under this framework, it is possible to investigate whether voters perceive the parties’ attempts to emphasize favored issues and respond accordingly in their electoral choices based on issues. The proposed model can be considered as a measure of the success of parties’ issue-related saliency efforts during campaigns and as a dynamic measure of associative issue ownership. Using individual survey data from Germany and Denmark over a period of thirty years and covering core campaign issues, the study, e.g., demonstrates how the model can trace how the German Greens gained and lost the ownership of environmental issues.