Party behaviour and issue ownership

Issue ownership is one of the main determinants of the vote, and it is hence electorally beneficial for parties to build a strong and stable reputation on their core issues. Even though issue ownership has already been studied extensively in the literature on party politics, the sources of issue ownership remain largely unknown. Furthermore, previous research has mostly focused on studying the individual-level determinants of issue ownership in single countries. Much less attention has been paid to how party-specific characteristics and behaviour can help parties to build issue ownership. In this study, we investigate the party-level sources of issue ownership. We combine party-level data with ownership perceptions compiled from a wide range of national election studies. These data allow us to systematically investigate four broad party-level variables, and their impact on the extent to which parties can build or lose a reputation as owner of an issue; party size, incumbency status, the amount of attention a party devotes to an issue, and pledge fulfilment on the issue. To capture parties’ attention for specific issue, we make use of the data of the Comparative Manifesto Project – with a focus on measures of the salience of a range of issues in parties’ manifestos. By combining this data with information on ownership perceptions, we test whether party strategies to increase the salience of an issue lead voters to increasingly perceive this party as the owner of the issue, and the party best able to handle this issue. We use a comparative data set on pledge fulfilment to investigate the performance dimension of issue ownership, linking the salience parties give to certain issues with their past performance in handling that issue and voter perceptions of parties’ competence. Combining these different dimensions, the study uncovers how parties can gain ownership over certain issues, how they use issue salience in their manifestos strategically given their performance, and how voters perceive these efforts.