How Does Parties’ Advertising and Medias’ Coverage Trigger Short-Term Changes in Issue Ownership Perceptions, and to Whom?

Issue ownership refers to the “the link between specific parties and issues in the mind of voters” (Walgrave et al. 2015, p. 778). Voters associate specific parties to specific issues and think that one party is the most competent to deal with an issue. While the seminal studies consider issue ownership as a stable phenomenon (Petrocik 1996, Budge and Farlie 1983), recent studies found that voters can change such perceptions in the short-term (e.g. Tresch and Feddersen 2018). It is crucial to understand what are the drivers of such changes since they have consequential effects on party choice (in)stability during a campaign (Lanz and Sciarini 2016, Petitpas and Sciarini 2018). The present paper investigates the role of exposure to news and ads about issues and political parties on citizens’ changes in perceptions of parties’ competence. Evidence regarding the effect of issue emphasis is mixed (Dahlberg and Martinsson 2015, Lanz 2017, Stubager and Seeberg 2016, Tresch and Feddersen 2018, Walgrave et al. 2009) and we need more investigation about the determinants of issue ownership changes during a campaign. In addition to the dynamic perspective, my contribution is twofold. First, I distinguish the effects of parties’ direct (ad) and indirect (media) communication, as issue priorities may differ on each channel (Tresch et al. 2018). The baseline hypothesis is that the more a party is visible on a given issue, the more likely a voter is to change her competence attribution in favor of this party. One could argue that indirect communication has a stronger effect because the media appear to be more ‘neutral’ than party ads. At the same time, it could be claimed that parties’ direct communication has a stronger impact because information is necessarily one-sided; it supports the party. A third possibility is that both communication channels work together. According to the “riding the wave” hypothesis, “campaign advertising becomes more persuasive when the candidates advertise on issues that dominate the news” (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994, p. 337). Secondly, I elaborate with moderation hypotheses by considering that voters are not equally sensitive to communication. I expect that partisanship, political sophistication, and issue salience alter the campaign effects as they increase or decrease resistance to persuasion. To capture individual dynamics during the campaign, I rely on a four-waves panel data collected during the 2015 Swiss national elections (FORS 2015b) including measures of issue ownership, salience, and opinion for five issues. In addition, I benefit from a media analysis (FORS 2015a) including all politics-related articles published in print and online media outlets during the campaign. Based on automated content analysis it contains information about party and issue visibility in each media article. Finally, I use a dataset (B¨uhlmann et al. 2015) containing party ads published in print media outlets in the course of the campaign.