How Issue Ownership Distorts American Politics

Egan, Patrick J.

doi:10.1017/cbo9781107337138.006

Cited by 74 publications

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“…93 Holian 2004. 94 Egan 2013. ownership effects does not preclude the possibility of individual exceptions, but it reveals how effects are observed across available institutional contexts in general. Our results hold over a range of operationalizations of issue ownership -a rank measure, an interval-level standardized measure and a measure based on the governing party's competence lead -but the results are not consistent in all contexts using the latter two.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Holian 24 analyzed presidential remarks in public and 15 See Green 2011. 16 Binder 1999;Cohen 2012;Coleman 1999;Edwards, Barrett, and Peake 1997;Egan 2013;Howell et al 2000;Kelly 1993. 17 See Petrocik 1996;Petrocik, Benoit, andHansen 2003. 18 Budge 1993;Budge andFarlie 1977, 1983;Budge, Hearl, and Robertson 1987.…”

Section: Issue Ownership and Executive And Legislative Agendasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…29 Note that these claims do not affect whether an incumbent party (the party of the president) achieves the policies closest to its ideal point, but rather the focus of the legislative institution on policy priorities. Egan (2013) reveals that voters do not necessarily agree more with a party on its owned issues; they simply associate the party with a commitment to them.…”

Section: A Contextual Theory Of How Par Ty Issue Reputations Influencmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Party Reputations and Policy Priorities: How Issue Ownership Shapes Executive and Legislative Agendas

Green¹,

Jennings²

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Election-oriented elites are expected to emphasize issues on which their party possesses 'issue ownership' during campaigns. This article extends those theories to the content of executive and legislative agendas. Arguing that executives have incentives to pursue their party's owned issues in the legislature, it theorizes three conditions under which these incentives are constrained: when governments are responsive to issues prioritized by the public, when a party has a stronger electoral mandate and under divided government. The theory is tested using time-series analyses of policy agendas of US congressional statutes and State of the Union addresses and UK acts of Parliament and the Queen's Speech . The results offer support for the theory, and are particularly strong for the US State of the Union address, providing insights into institutional differences. The implications provide reassurance concerning the conditions under which governments focus attention only on their partisan issue priorities.Keywords: issue ownership; saliency theory; agenda setting; legislative priorities An extensive literature predicts the issue agendas of parties and candidates during election campaigns. Election-oriented elites attempt to emphasize issues on which their party has 'issue ownership' 1 and avoid issues on which another party has an advantage. Parties are not wholly free to achieve this 'selective emphasis'.2 The issue agenda of an election campaign is a matter of competition between rivals, as well as the wider campaign context of media attention, policy events, and what voters already care most about and decide upon. But insofar as a party's owned issues (the issue associations voters hold about different political parties and their reputation for trust and competence) overlap with their partisan priorities -those issues on which elites, members and activists care most about 3 -a party that achieves its goal of winning office should try to pursue the party's owned issues in the legislature. A governing period is precisely the time when Petrocik 4 expects a party to demonstrate its ownership of issues via legislative attention and commitment.* School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester (email: jane.green@manchester.ac.uk); Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton (email: w.j.jennings@soton.ac.uk). The data on US policy agendas were originally collected by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, with the support of National Science Foundation grant numbers SBR 9320922 and 0111611, distributed through the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The data on UK policy agendas were collected by Peter John, Will Jennings and Shaun Bevan with the support of ESRC research award RES-062-23-0872. Data on issue competence were collected by Jane Green and Will Jennings with the support of ESRC research award RES-000-22-4616. We thank Shaun Bevan for advice on model specification and Frank Baumgartner for valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. T...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Issue Ownership and Executive And Legislative Agendasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Contextual Theory Of How Par Ty Issue Reputations Influencmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Party Reputations and Policy Priorities: How Issue Ownership Shapes Executive and Legislative Agendas

Green¹,

Jennings²

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…This is considered a liberal issue because traditionally, and especially exacerbated by the years-long debate over the Affordable Care Act, liberals tend to favor universal health coverage and a more pronounced role for the government in this regard (Aaron and Lucida 2013). And similar to defense above, Egan (2013) finds healthcare is another consistently owned issue by Democrats. Therefore, liberal constituencies should increase the likelihood of legislators introducing healthcare-related legislation.…”

Section: Issues and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 65%

“…But how do parties come to "own" issues? Egan (2013) notes that partisan issue ownership flows from the fact that parties prioritize certain issues over others and are in turn awarded ownership on certain issues by the mass public. Others, too, have echoed this notion that stances on certain issues should vary by parties based on highlighting of certain issues to the exclusion of others, such as Petrocik's (1996) findings, summed up by Hetherington and Rudolph (2015, 139): "Republicans tend to talk about foreign policy because they "own" it while Democrats tend to talk about social welfare policy because they "own" it."…”

Section: Bill Sponsorship As Issue-specific Responsivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Responsiveness in the U.S. House of Representatives

Waggoner

2018

ARP

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Legislators are elected to be the voice of their constituents in government. Implicit in this electoral connection is the responsiveness of legislators to the preferences of constituents. Many past approaches only examine successful legislative behavior blessed by the majority party, not all legislative behavior, thereby limiting inference generalizability. I seek to overcome this limitation by considering bill sponsorship as an outlet in which all members are free to engage. Testing expectations on bill sponsorship in the 109th and 110th Congresses, I ﬁnd that legislators are responsive, though only on “safely-owned” issues. I compare these ﬁndings to roll call voting on the same issues in the same Congresses and ﬁnd a diﬀerent pattern, suggesting legislators leverage bill sponsorship diﬀerently than roll call voting as they signal legislative priorities.

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What Drives U.S. Congressional Members’ Policy Attention on Twitter?

Hemphill¹,

Russell²,

Schöpke‐Gonzalez³

2020

Policy & Internet

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Understanding how Members of Congress (MCs) distribute their political attention is key to a number of areas of political science research including agenda setting, framing, and issue evolution. Tweets illuminate what lawmakers are paying attention to by aggregating information from newsletters, press releases, and floor debates to provide a birds-eye view of a lawmaker's diverse agenda. In order to leverage this data efficiently, we trained a supervised machine learning classifier to label tweets according to the Comparative Agenda Project's Policy Codebook and used the results to examine the differential attention that policy topics receive from MCs. The classifier achieved an F1 score of 0.79 and a Cohen's kappa with human labelers of 0.78, suggesting good performance. Using this classifier, we labeled 1,485,834 original MC tweets (Retweets were excluded) and conducted a multinomial logistic regression to understand what influenced the policy areas MCs Tweeted about. Our model reveals differences in political attention along party, chamber, and gender lines and their interactions. Our approach allows us to study MCs' political attention in near real-time and to uncover both intra-and inter-group differences.

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How Issue Ownership Distorts American Politics

Cited by 74 publications

References 0 publications

Party Reputations and Policy Priorities: How Issue Ownership Shapes Executive and Legislative Agendas

Party Reputations and Policy Priorities: How Issue Ownership Shapes Executive and Legislative Agendas

Exploring Responsiveness in the U.S. House of Representatives

What Drives U.S. Congressional Members’ Policy Attention on Twitter?

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