Does Accessibility Mediate the Effects of Issue Ownership on Party Evaluations? Evidence from the Swiss 2019 Election

“Response time”, i.e., the time taken by respondents to answer a (survey) question, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In the main, response times (RTs) are usually thought to measure the accessibility and strength of mental constructs which are retrieved to answer a question. In this paper, we apply this conceptualization of RTs to the field of “issue ownership” (IO). Past research has established that the reputation of parties as “owning” specific issues has the potential to influence voting behavior. In short, citizens who identify a particular issue as personally important and who perceive a party as best able to deal with it (competence IO) or spontaneously associate the issue with the party (associative IO) are more likely to vote for that party. Building on this account, we propose to reinterpret com¬petence IO as a perception having a built-in accessibility dimension, which may be assessed by RTs. Accordingly, we develop a method for measuring RTs, using the first wave of the Selects panel survey for the 2019 Swiss elections, and we examine the hypothesis that competence judgments which are provided faster exert a greater influence on evaluations of the perceived issue owner. Preliminary results indicate that the hypothesis is confirmed only for a subset of competence attributions, with tend to coincide with the issues which are most commonly thought to be owned by each party.