Issue Ownership and Vote Choice: Accounting for of the Causal Relationship

• In Event: Elections and Voting Behavior Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Elections and Voting Behavior: Voter Turnout and Choices Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Issue ownership theory has received increasing attention since the introduction of the concept almost four decades ago (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996). In essence, it states that political parties own certain issue areas and benefit at the polls when these owned issues are salient in the period leading up to an election. In the original model formulated by Petrocik (1996), issue ownership, that is, voters’ perception of a party being best able to handle an issue, is thought to be the critical constant between elections. Issue saliency, whether or not the issue is on the campaign agenda and thereby important for the voters’ choice of party, is the critical variable between elections. Subsequent work has found that issue ownership, in a West European multiparty system context, is less stable than the original issue ownership model claimed (e.g. ): Voters perception of the party that is best able to handle a policy area changes from election to election and during election campaigns. This spurs questions into the causal relationship between vote choice and issue ownership (e.g. Walgrave et al. 2015). Are opinions about what parties are best able to handle issues just a byproduct of vote choice?
In this paper we make two main contributions to the literature on issue ownership. First, we discuss the theoretical relationship between issue ownership and vote choice. While unstable issue ownership makes the model less theoretically satisfying, we present a theoretical perspective on the individual level on how issue ownership can influence vote choice, and vote choice can increase the scope of ownership (ownership on more issues). Second, we empirically investigate the causal relationship between opinions on party with best policy on issues and vote choice by the help of two rather unique data sources. First, we build a panel dataset by pooling the panel component from the 2005, 2009, 2013, and 2017 Norwegian Election Studies including questions on best policy on numerous issues and vote choice. Second, we utilize the Norwegian Election Campaign Panel Study 2017, including items on party with best policy and vote intention in four waves before under and after the 2017 campaign.
By stacking the data, we are able to study the relationship between issue ownership and vote choice, irrespective of party, using long-term (between elections) and short-term (in the election campaign) panel-data. The results of cross-lagged panel-models indicate that the relationship between issue ownership and vote choice depends on the saliency of the issue at hand. If an issue is at the top of the voters’ mind, there is a substantial effect of issue ownership on vote choice, rather than the reverse effect. We discuss the implications of this for future studies of issue ownership and voting.

Authors

• Johannes Bergh, Institute for social research

• Atle Haugsgjerd, University of Oslo, Department of Political Science

• Rune Karlsen, Institute for Social Research