Bringing Issue Ownership Voting to the Next Level: The Moderating Influence of National and EU Level Policy Competence in EP Election Voting

Issue ownership theory argues that when voters consider a party as more competent than others to solve problems of importance to voters, they are more likely to vote for this party (Budge & Farlie, 1983; Petrocik, 1996). A growing number of studies demonstrate the electoral effects of issue reputations, and as such issue ownership is considered a valuable electoral asset (see, e.g. Bélanger & Meguid, 2008). However, the existing literature on issue ownership has not yet examined to what extent the multilevel nature of policymaking, which is prevalent in the multilevel structure of the EU, affects the role of parties’ issue reputations in electoral choice. On the one hand, given that competences are increasingly transferred away from the national level, it is unclear to what extent voters perceive issues as being dealt with at the national level, e.g. social welfare, or at the European level, e.g. immigration. On the other hand, it is unclear whether these perceptions affect the impact of parties’ issue reputations on voters’ electoral choices. In this paper we investigate two related questions: first, to what extent do voters perceive issue domains as being governed mainly at the national, or at the EU level? Second, do these perceptions moderate the impact of issue ownership on these issues on voters’ electoral choices in the EP elections? We expect that in the context of EP elections, the effect of issue reputations on the vote is greater for issues which voters perceive as being governed at the EU level. Conversely, the impact of issue reputations for issues that are perceived as ‘national’ issues should be smaller. We test our model using original survey data collected in ten EU countries (CZ, DE, DK, ES, FR, GR, HU, NL, PL, SE) in the context of the 2019 EP elections (Europinions project), by examining the electoral impact of party reputations on five issues – immigration, social welfare, Europe, economy and terrorism, and assessing the extent to which their effects are moderated by voters’ perceptions of the main governance level (national or EU) for each issue.