Measuring Issue Ownership: A Comparative Question Wording Experiment

Issue ownership, or the idea that some parties are considered by the public to be better able or more committed to dealing with specific issues, is increasingly used in studies of electoral choice. Yet, various scholars have argued that if measures of issue ownership are confounded with party choice, this raises concerns regarding their usability to predict electoral choice. This research note examines to what extent various measures of issue ownership are confounded with voters’ party preferences and voters’ agreement with the party's position on the issue. Relying on an online survey‐embedded question wording experiment fielded in two countries (Belgium and Denmark), question wording effects for two dimension of issue ownership are examined: competence issue ownership and associative issue ownership. It is found that, in both countries, the two associative issue ownership measures were less affected by party preference and positional agreement. The most used competence issue ownership measures are most confounded with party choice and positional agreement in the experiment. Results in the two countries are largely similar, the main exception being that one of the two associative measures performs worse in Denmark. The results imply that scholars should take care in using measures of especially competence issue ownership to predict the vote, but that also country differences affect the validity of issue ownership measures.     

Sustainable governance of natural resources and institutional change–an analytical framework

This article presents a conceptual framework for analysing the governance of natural resource use, as governance is often the primary issue when natural resources are overexploited and degraded. It addresses both spontaneous and active governance, including institutional change induced by development co‐operation. Drawing on existing frameworks of institutional analysis, fundamental modifications are presented to adapt the concept to the context of international co‐operation, and to include dynamic aspects of institutional change as well as multiple actor interactions. Tested in several case studies, the framework was found suitable and relevant for use in project planning and evaluation, as well as for comparing governance issues across cases in a conceptually rigorous way. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Successful DNA typing of a urine sample in a doping control case using human mitochondrial DNA analysis

In a doping control case, a urine sample was tested positive for nandrolon. We were asked by the athlete to perform DNA investigations on the questioned urine sample and compare these to a fresh blood sample taken from the athlete in order to detect or rule out manipulation and/or switching of the samples. The urine sample had been collected nine months prior to the investigation and had been stored at 4 degrees C. In a first approach, nuclear DNA systems were investigated that failed with the exception of the Amelogenin system. Due to the high copy number of mitochondrial DNA molecules and the robustness of the mitochondrial genome, we investigated the HVR I and HVR II regions of mitochondrial DNA and obtained reproducible and clear sequencing results for both the blood and the urine samples. Due to the identical sequences, it could not be excluded that the blood sample and the urine sample were from the same individual or an individual having the same maternal lineage.     

Laughter and Liability: The Politics of British and Dutch Television Satire

Contemporary politicians face immense rhetorical and communicative challenges. Performing on the intertwined stages of politics, media (including Internet) and everyday life, they need to master diverse and contrasting repertoires of talk. Political communication research, at present, has ignored the question of how politicians face and experience these challenges, and how they reflect on the new communicative field. In this article, we begin to redress this situation by analysing and comparing the motives, experiences and reflections of politicians who appeared in the British satirical TV show, Have I Got News for You, and its Dutch adaptation, Dit was het Nieuws. Based on in-depth interviews with seven Dutch and 14 English MPs, we conclude that they draw from three repertoires to legitimise and reflect on their participation: a strategic, indulgent and anti-elitist repertoire. The first repertoire is predictable in the context of current political communication research, whereas the latter two add new dimensions of pleasure and bottom-up representation to it.     

Associative Issue Ownership as a Determinant of Voters’ Campaign Attention

Campaigns raise public interest in politics and allow parties to convey their messages to voters. However, voters’ exposure and attention during campaigns are biased towards parties and candidates they like. This hinders parties’ ability to reach new voters. This paper theorises and empirically tests a simple way in which parties can break partisan selective attention: owning an issue. When parties own issues that are important for a voter, that voter is more likely to notice them. Using survey data collected prior to the 2009 Belgian regional elections it is shown that this effect exists independent of partisan preferences and while controlling for the absolute visibility of a party in the media. This indicates that issue ownership has an independent impact on voters’ attention to campaigns. This finding shows that owning salient issues yields (potential) advantages for parties, since getting noticed is a prerequisite for conveying electoral messages and increasing electoral success.     

Sozialpolitik im Finanzföderalismus – Hartz IV als Antwort auf die Krise der Kommunalfinanzen

In the literature on welfare state reforms, continental welfare states like Germany have been considered to be resistant to reform. However, recently scholars started to argue that new reform coalitions and policy learning have led to a major restructuring of the German welfare state. In this article we introduce a third argument into the debate and claim that the recent reforms can only be understood by taking into account the specific structure of welfare state financing in Germany. Focusing on the reform of unemployment benefits we show that the crisis of the widespread cost-shifting practice between the federal budget, the social insurance and local authority budgets contributed to fiscal problems which could ultimately only be resolved by engaging in a fundamental restructuring of the financing architecture of welfare provisions for the long-term unemployed.