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What Are the Sources of Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? Testing Four Explanations at the Individual Level

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Abstract

Political parties’ issue ownership—their perceived competence in handling issues and problems—is a major ingredient explaining voting behavior. Yet, our understanding of the sources of issue ownership is limited. This study is the first to bring together and evaluate four different explanations of voters’ perceptions of parties’ issue ownership: partisanship, attitudes, perceived real-world developments, and constituency-based ownership. Using novel measures implemented in a national survey, we show that all four sources exert independent, if varying, influences on voters’ issue ownership perceptions. Even though voters’ partisanship tends to dominate issue ownership perceptions, attitudes and performance evaluations also matter. Moreover, the hitherto mostly neglected constituency based component of ownership has a substantial, independent influence on ownership perceptions. These findings indicate that issue ownership is more than merely an expression of partisanship and attitudes.

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Notes

  1. On this background, Kuechler (1991) and Bellucci (2006) refer to partisanship and attitudes as “affective” sources of issue ownership. To the extent that partisanship is better conceived of as “a continually updated ‘running tally’ of the performance capabilities of competing parties” (Sanders et al. 2011, p. 290; cf. Fiorina 1981), this might challenge the classification of partisanship as an affective source of issue ownership. It would, however, challenge neither the effect nor the causal status of partisanship in the present context since the “running tally” exists prior to the evaluation of ownership of a given issue.

  2. For a dynamic analysis of issue ownership on the issue of crime, see Holian (2004).

  3. Related work on perceptions of the social bases of parties include Key (1961, pp. 433–438), Miller et al. (1991), and Green et al. (2002); however, their work does not explicitly connect to parties’ issue ownership.

  4. A valid concern is that online respondents differ from randomly selected respondents, for example by being more politically interested and, in turn, more consistent in their attitudes and evaluations. In our data, we find that online respondents are slightly more politically interested than respondents from the random sample (e.g., 30 % of online respondents say they are very interested in politics as compared to 21 % among the random sample). However, the results reported below are robust if we only include respondents from the random sample. Further information about the data is available from the authors upon request.

  5. The wording of the taxation issue is a partial exception; however, see the discussion in the analysis section below.

  6. In Danish the word “borgerlig” (bourgeois) is a widely used synonym for right wing used regardless of issue content. Throughout, “Don’t know” responses have been excluded from the analyses. The distribution of answers across the issues can be found in Table 7 in the appendix.

  7. The original measure asked respondents whether they perceived themselves as adherents of a party, which one, and whether they were strong or not strong adherents. Respondents, who did not see themselves as adherents of a particular party, were subsequently asked whether they were closer to a party or not. To conform to the format of the issue ownership measures, responses for the individual parties were categorized into the left and right wing in the following way: The Social Democrats, the Social Liberals, the Socialist People’s Party, and the Red-Green Alliance formed the left wing while the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Danish People’s Party, New Alliance, and the Christian Democrats formed the right wing. The parties were classified based on whether they supported the Social Democratic or the bourgeois candidate for Prime Minister.

  8. The two versions are also referred to as, respectively, “mediated” and “unmediated.”

  9. The distribution of responses on the two items can be found in Table 7 in the appendix.

  10. Similar results are obtained if they are entered as categorical variables.

  11. Whereas Nagelkerke’s R 2 can be, roughly, interpreted as the standard R 2 from OLS models, smaller values of both AIC and BIC indicate higher explanatory power. While, on the one hand, it is not possible to perform significance tests on AIC and BIC, they are, on the other hand, suited for comparison of non-nested models which makes them ideal for our purposes (cf. below).

  12. Where possible, the uncued version of performance evaluations is used in the combined model.

  13. Since the two models are not nested, a formal comparison of the coefficients is not possible. However, on law and order, the sizes of the standard errors of the estimates for attitude and uncued performance evaluations are such that the 95 % confidence intervals around each coefficient do not contain the value of the other coefficient; they are, in other words, different from each other. On the environment, the coefficients do not differ in this statistical sense, cf. also below.

  14. Incidentally, this would seem to indicate that the worry raised in the measurement section above, that the taxation ownership item is worded too narrowly in the sense that it focuses on keeping taxes down, is unfounded. Thus, all four proposed sources perform as expected indicating that respondents have answered the taxation item on the same basis as the other three ownership items analyzed.

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Acknowledgments

We have received many helpful comments from the members of the Research Section on Danish and Comparative Politics at Aarhus University as well as from seminar participants at the University of Copenhagen, the 2009 ECPR General Conference in Potsdam, Germany, the XVI Nordic Political Science Conference in Vaasa, Finland, and four anonymous reviewers. Slothuus acknowledges support from the Danish Social Science Research Council. The data analyzed were collected with support from the Danish Social Science Research Council and are available through the Danish Data Archive (www.dda.dk).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Rune Stubager & Rune Slothuus

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  1. Rune Stubager
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Correspondence to Rune Stubager.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Distribution of answers on perceived issue ownership and group–party linkages
Full size table

Measures of respondents’ attitudes.

For the environment, law and order, and social inequality, the various items were collected in scales. All measures run from 0 to 1 with 1 being the most rightist position.

The Environment:

  • Economic growth should be ensured by expanding industry, even if this is at the cost of environmental interests.

  • Measures to improve the environment should not go so far as to damage business conditions.

The five response categories range from completely agree to completely disagree. The two items correlate at r = −.56.

Law and Order:

  • Violent crimes should be punished much harder than is currently the case (response categories as above).

  • Some parties are in favor of maintaining law and order by means of stiffer sentences. Other parties, instead, talk about preventing crime and treating criminals humanely. Where would you place yourself on this scale where 1 stands for those who are most in favor of law and order while 5 stands for those who are most in favor of prevention and humanly treatment of criminals.

The two items correlate at r = .48.

Social Inequality:

  • In politics, one should strive to assure the same economic conditions for everyone, regardless of education and employment (response categories as above).

  • To create dynamism and progress in society, one has to accept a certain measure of inequality (response categories as above).

  • Because people’s abilities differ, it is natural to accept a certain inequality (response categories as above).

  • A certain measure of inequality is desirable as there are differences in people’s efforts (response categories as above).

  • Some parties are in favor of extensive equality while others think that inequality is necessary to create dynamism in society. Where would you place yourself on this scale where 1 stands for those who are in favor of extensive equality and 5 stands for those who think that inequality is necessary to create dynamism in society.

The intercorrelations (r) between the items range from .33 to .74. A scale of all five items has a Cronbach’s α of .84.

Taxation:

  • High incomes should be taxed more than is currently the case (response categories as above).

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Stubager, R., Slothuus, R. What Are the Sources of Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? Testing Four Explanations at the Individual Level. Polit Behav 35, 567–588 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9204-2

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