Where Does Issue Ownership Come From? From the Party or from the Media? Issue-party Identifications in Belgium, 1991-2005

Abstract

Although widely used in political science to tackle voting behavior and campaign strategy, the issue-ownership thesis remains untested when it comes to the origins of parties’ identification with specific issues. This article explores where issue ownership comes from and/or how it is maintained. The authors test two possible avenues of issue ownership: the party and the mass media. On one hand, parties’ own external communication may stress specific issues, claiming to be best placed to solve these issues. On the other hand, parties could be identified by the media with certain issues, leading to an implicit association between issue and party. The authors test both propositions, drawing on the case of Belgium, a small consociational democracy in Western Europe. Belgium is a good case to examine issue ownership, as its many parties are identified with many issues. Relying on extensive media data and party evidence, they find that issue ownership is related both to party communications and media coverage. This applies in particular to newer, challenging parties that are strongly identified with their core issues. In general, parties’ older communications are drivers of issue ownership; in contrast, recent media coverage contributes to issue ownership. The direction of the causal arrow remains unsure.

Priming Issues, Party Visibility, and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

“…This dynamic part is affected by news coverage of issues and parties. A study on the sources of issue ownership showed that while party programs affect long-term perceptions of issue ownership, media coverage has a more immediate effect on issue ownership perception (Walgrave & De Swert, 2007). In addition, recent experimental research (Bos, Lefevere, Thijssen, & Sheets, 2016;Dahlberg & Martinsson, 2015;Tresch, Lefevere, & Walgrave, 2015;Walgrave et al, 2009) has shown that news messages can affect issue ownership perceptions and vote preferences on the short term.…”

“…Theoretically, we expect issue news to be related to electoral volatility based on recent research showing that issue ownership also has a volatile component (Walgrave & De Swert, 2007;Walgrave, Lefevere, & Nuytemans, 2009;Walgrave, Lefevere, & Tresch, 2014). The stable component comes from parties' distinctive constituencies (Stubager & Slothuus, 2012).…”

“…In the current study we test our model at the micro level to understand the effect of issue news on individual-level vote change, explained by issue ownership theory. We test agenda setting and priming implicitly by examining whether media attention for owned issues induces vote switching.Theoretically, we expect issue news to be related to electoral volatility based on recent research showing that issue ownership also has a volatile component (Walgrave & De Swert, 2007;Walgrave, Lefevere, & Nuytemans, 2009;Walgrave, Lefevere, & Tresch, 2014). The stable component comes from parties' distinctive constituencies (Stubager & Slothuus, 2012).…”

“…The party with the best solution or track record for a given issue is considered to be the "owner" of that issue (issues being, for example, employment, immigration, or health care). Since parties communicate their issue emphasis via the media (Walgrave & De Swert, 2007), one should not only take into account which party owns which issue, but also which issue received most emphasis during a campaign in order to empirically test all facets of the issue ownership theory. Thus, issue attention in news coverage should also be included in the issue ownership voting models.…”

Party policy change. Exploring the limits of ideological flexibility in Belgium

“…The importance of an issue was determined by its salience during the period 1961-2010. We assume that the more an issue was mentioned in the manifestos of the parties of this research, the more electoral (Walgrave and De Swert, 2007) and ideological importance this issue held for a party. Table 4 and 5 show the number of quasi-sentences that were spent on the different categories of the coding scheme.…”