Who benefits from new issues? COVID-19 and party switching in Switzerland

The spectacular electoral gains of the Greens and the Green Liberals in the 2019 Swiss elections have often been explained by the high salience of the climate issue. Such an explanation is in line with issue ownership theory, which expects voters to cast their ballot for the party with the best reputation on the most salient issue at the time of the election. Since the elections, however, voters’ problem concerns have changed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we analyze which parties stand to win or lose from voters’ changing issue priorities. We generally expect that voters are more inclined to switch to a governing party, because COVID-19 is a new issue, which is not previously owned by any party, and the crisis has generally strengthened the executive. Alternatively, as traditional owners of two related dimensions of the pandemic—the economy and health—we expect the Liberals and the Social Democrats to benefit the most. We test our expectations by relying on the 2019 and 2020 panel waves conducted in the framework of the Swiss Election Study (Selects) among a representative sample of Swiss voters. Our results show that considering the COVID-19 pandemic as the most important problem has no effect on switching to governing parties, but a positive effect on switching to the FDP, and a negative effect on switching to the Greens. Moreover, voters who attribute competence ownership of the pandemic to a specific party are significantly more inclined to switch to this party – except for the Greens.