The Issue Agenda,Party Competence and Popularity: An Empirical Analysis of Austria 1989–2004

This article analyses the effects of the issue agenda and of party competence on party popularity. Based on the salience and the issue ownership literatures, shifts in party support may be attributable to two factors: changing voter perceptions of issue salience and shifts in perceived party competence. We thus hypothesize that (1) a party's popularity increases if the public issue agenda changes in its favour such that its “best” issues become more important to voters and (2) that voters' changing perceptions of party competence account for shifting party popularity. Using annual macro data on voter perceptions of the issue agenda, party competence and popularity in Austria, we find no support for the first hypothesis. Rather, voter perceptions of party issue competence vary considerably and this variation accounts for the parties' level of popular support. This suggests that party competition plays out more by what politicians actually do and what impression they give about their deeds and competence than by exercising influence on the issue agenda.     

Simulation Analysis of the Effect of Party Identification on Finnish Parties' Optimal Positions

The Finnish National Election Study of 2003 revealed that most voters in Finland do not identify with parties and are self‐described as independents. In this article it is asserted that partisan attachments affect Finnish parties' optimal positions despite the large amount of independents. To show this, the article is divided in two parts. In the first part, voters' decisions are assumed to be deterministic. To show the effect of party identification under deterministic voting, two different types of simulations are conducted: the partisan type, where the partisans' voting behaviour depends on their distance from the party and on a degree of partisan attachment, and the apartisan type, where voting behaviour depends solely on policy issue distance. Results show that partisan attachments drive parties to adopt different ‘one‐off’ optimal positions than they would if party competition was solely based on policy issue distance. In the second part of the article, it is assumed that voters' decisions are probabilistic. Upon showing that party identification makes a voting model solely based on distance significantly more fit, the predicted probabilities of party choice are computed. Results indicate that the probability that a voter will vote for a party is higher when the party is located at its optimal position according to the partisan type of simulations rather than the apartisan one.     

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.     

Does party rhetoric affect voter perceptions of party positions?

Do voters listen to parties? Do they pay attention to and understand parties' policy messages? We explore these questions with two studies. First, we assembled the most comprehensive cross-national dataset on media coverage of parties' rhetoric during election campaigns and show that parties’ media messages about their left-right positions significantly affect voter perceptions of these positions. We corroborate the cross-national results with panel data from the UK that allow us to more rigorously identify the party rhetoric effect and to show that it extends beyond the left-right super issue: party messages affect voter perceptions also on specific issues, such as income redistribution and European integration. Taken together, these findings suggest that voters indeed listen to parties and understand their policy messages.     

Long-term associative issue ownership change: a panel study in Belgium

Issue ownership has gained a prominent position as one of the key theories to understand how voter’s issue perceptions affect their electoral behavior. Yet, whereas the original theory assumed that party reputations were relatively stable, various studies have shown that issue ownership perceptions fluctuate over time. Despite the growing evidence that ownership perceptions are dynamic, we know surprisingly little about the determinants of change, especially at the individual level. This paper develops an individual-level framework to understand how issue ownership perceptions change over time, arguing that mediated party communication is a key driver of change. It also incorporates individual features of voters, most notably their political predispositions – as determinants of changing issue ownership perceptions. We test our model on unique longitudinal panel data from Belgium, spanning a five-year period. The results suggest that party communications, government participation, party size and voter’s party preferences determine changes in ownership perceptions.     

What can a party say? How parties' communication can influence voters' issue ownership perceptions

Research has documented that issue ownership is an important aspect of voter behaviour. Therefore, issue ownership is an important asset for parties and one that they might try to improve on in order to enhance their electoral chances. Using survey experiments on a representative sample of Danish voters, the paper investigates what messages a party can convey to voters in order to improve its issue ownership – communicating its emphasis on the issue, its position on the issue, its links to the issue constituency, or its performance on the issue – across both valence and position issues. The results show the effectiveness of the latter two communication strategies thereby documenting that parties through their communication may affect voters' perceptions of their issue handling competencies.     

The Conceptualisation and Measurement of Issue Ownership

Issue ownership means that some parties are considered by the public at large as being more able to deal with, or more attentive to, certain issues. The theory has been used to explain both party behaviour – parties are expected to focus on owned issues – and voter behaviour – when a voter considers a party to own an issue, this affects the odds of voting for that party. The purpose of this article is, first, to provide a look backward at the existing research through a literature review of the studies that were conducted in the past decade-and-a-half. Secondly, it takes stock of the current conceptualisation and argues that issue ownership is a multidimensional concept. Thereafter the article discusses how this multidimensionality affects both the role of issue ownership in voter and in party behaviour. Finally, the article outlines a number of shortcomings of the extant literature and discusses potential avenues for future research.     

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.     

Leaders, voters and activists in the elections in Great Britain 2005 and 2010

Discussion of the relationship between parties and the electorate is often based on the notion of partisan constituencies, that parties adopt policy positions that correspond to the average position of the party supporters. In contrast, the Downsian “spatial model” assumes that parties are purely opportunistic and maneuver to gain as many votes as possible. A third, more empirical model, based on the early work of Stokes, assumes that voter choice is based on the evaluation of each of the party leader’s competence or ability to deliver policy success. Such an evaluation can be provided by individual voter overall assessment in terms of the leaders’ character traits.This paper attempts to relate these three classes of models by examining the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. Using the British Election Study, we construct spatial models of these elections in Great Britain as well as in the three regions of England, Scotland and Wales. The models incorporate the electoral perceptions of character traits. We compare the equilibrium vote maximizing positions with the partisan positions, estimated by taking the mean of each of the parties voters’ preferred positions. We define an equilibrium to be a stable attractor if the vote share at the equilibrium exceeds the share at the partisan position by a significant proportion (determined by the implicit error of the stochastic model). We infer that none of the equilibria are stable attractors, and suggest that the partisan positions are also preferred by the party activists, the key supporters of each party.     

Partisan Elites as Culprits? How Party Cues Shape Partisan Perceptual Gaps

Partisanship often colors how citizens perceive real‐world conditions. For example, an oft‐documented finding is that citizens tend to view the state of the national economy more positively if their party holds office. These partisan perceptual gaps are usually taken as a result of citizens' own motivated reasoning to defend their party identity. However, little is known about the extent to which perceptual gaps are shaped by one of the most important forces in politics: partisan elites. With two studies focusing on perceptions of the economy—a quasi‐experimental panel study and a randomized experiment—we show how partisan perceptual differences are substantially affected by messages coming from party elites. These findings imply that partisan elites are more influential on, and more responsible for, partisan perceptual differences than previous studies have revealed.     

The more the better? Cumulative issue ownership and intra-campaign party switching

We contribute to the literature on short term changes in voters' party preferences (or intra-campaign party switching), by advancing a factor that has been neglected so far: Voters' perceptions about parties' issue competence. We develop a model of party switching that includes both classic predictors and issue ownership considerations. Moreover, in contrast to the usual single issue ownership conception focusing on the party deemed most competent to solve the most important problem, we argue that voters base their party choice on their perceptions of parties' competence on a variety of issues, i.e. on cumulative issue ownership. We test our model on panel data from the 2015 Swiss election study. The change in competence perceptions appears as a strong predictor of party switching: The higher the increase in the number of issues on which voters see a party as most competent during the campaign, the higher their likelihood to switch to that party.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

Candidate Choice Without Party Labels:

In the absence of party labels, voters must use other information to determine whom to support. The institution of nonpartisan elections, therefore, may impact voter choice by increasing the weight that voters place on candidate dimensions other than partisanship. We hypothesize that in nonpartisan elections, voters will exhibit a stronger preference for candidates with greater career and political experience, as well as candidates who can successfully signal partisan or ideological affiliation without directly using labels. To test these hypotheses, we conducted conjoint survey experiments on both nationally representative and convenience samples that vary the presence or absence of partisan information. The primary result of these experiments indicates that when voters cannot rely on party labels, they give greater weight to candidate experience. We find that this process unfolds differently for respondents of different partisan affiliations: Republicans respond to the removal of partisan information by giving greater weight to job experience while Democrats respond by giving greater weight to political experience. Our results lend microfoundational support to the notion that partisan information can crowd out other kinds of candidate information.     

Changing Issue Ownership through Policy Communication

Issue ownership has been an important concept in the analysis of party competition for several decades. Traditionally, issue ownership has been regarded as a stable phenomenon where parties are advantaged by different political issues. However, several recent studies have reported change in voters’ perceptions of parties’ issue ownership. To investigate the changeability of issue ownership and how it can be altered, this article investigates the impact of parties’ communication attempts through a web-based survey in Sweden. Two major political issues are in focus: employment and healthcare. The results show that parties can indeed improve their ownership by communicating on an issue. Indications were also found that the effects decrease as other parties simultaneously communicate on the same issue, and when those who receive the messages are ideologically distant from the party. However, in several cases results are weak. Many important conditionalities therefore remain to be explored in future studies.     

Voter perceptions of coalition policy positions in multiparty systems

A growing body of research shows how voters consider coalition formation and policy compromises at the post-electoral stage when making vote choices. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how voters perceive policy positions of coalition governments. Using new survey data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), we study voter perceptions of coalition policy platforms. We find that voters do in general have reasonable expectations of the coalitions' policy positions. However, partisan beliefs and uncertainty affect how voters perceive coalition positions: in addition to projection biases similar to those for individual party placements, partisans of coalition parties tend to align the position of the coalition with their own party's policy position, especially for those coalitions they prefer the most. In contrast, there is no consistent effect of political knowledge on the voters' uncertainty when evaluating coalition policy positions.     

Issue Ownership of the Economy: Cross-Time Effects on Vote Choice

Issue ownership has become a useful concept for explaining party and voter behaviour in electoral democracies. This article argues that issue ownership can also provide us with a better understanding of the economic issue’s impact on the vote because perceptions of party competence at managing the economy can counterbalance the influence of retrospective economic evaluations, by encouraging voters to put economic performance (good or bad) into perspective. These general expectations are tested with the use of individual-level survey data from five Canadian Election Studies conducted between 1984 and 2011. That relatively long period of time allows estimation of the impact on incumbent vote choice of competence perceptions and economic assessments during both good and bad economic times. Consequently, the article shows that issue ownership of the economy matters to vote choice, that its influence has been consistent across elections, and that it outweighs the impact of retrospective economic judgements.     

The Mobilizing Effect of Parties' Moral Rhetoric

How does parties' use of moral rhetoric affect voter behavior? Prior comparative party research has studied party positions without much attention to how parties explain and justify their positions. Drawing insights from political and moral psychology, I argue that moral rhetoric mobilizes copartisan voters by activating positive emotions about their partisan preference. I expect this to hold among copartisans who are exposed to party rhetoric. To test my argument, I measure moral rhetoric by text-analyzing party manifestos from six English-speaking democracies and measure mobilization using copartisan turnout in survey data. The results support my argument. Furthermore, I find evidence in support of the theoretical mechanism using survey experiments and panel survey data from Britain. The article shows that moral rhetoric is a party campaign frame that has important consequences for voter behavior.     

Measuring issue ownership with survey questions. A question wording experiment

Issue ownership, which has a competence and an associative dimension, refers to the link between issues and parties in voters' minds. Although used frequently in voting research, there remain worries about the validity of its current measures. The measures may be confounded with respondents' (dis)agreement with parties' position and general party evaluations. Through a question wording experiment we compare measures of both issue ownership types and test which are most affected by the two confounding factors. We find that competence issue ownership measures are heavily affected by confounding factors while associative issue ownership wordings are less. Challenging existing research, we find that especially the classic ‘best at handling’-wording tapping competence issue ownership is most conflated with positions and party preference.     

The Impact of Ballot Type on Voter Errors

Studies of ballots have traditionally focused on roll‐off, candidate order, and partisan advantage. This study is among the first to assess the impact of ballots on individual‐level voter errors. We develop new hypotheses by bringing together theoretical insights from usability research and political science about the effects of ballots with and without a straight‐party voting option. By comparing voters’ intentions to the votes they cast, we are able to create two measures of voter errors: votes unintentionally cast for the wrong candidate and unintentional undervotes. Voters generally make fewer errors of both types when using a standard office‐bloc ballot than when using an office‐bloc ballot with a straight‐party option, with the number of wrong‐candidate errors substantially exceeding the number of unintentional undervotes. Voters’ background characteristics have a significant impact on their ability to vote without error. Our results offer a new perspective for evaluating the use of the straight‐party option.     

Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Does partisan conflict damage citizens’ perceptions of Congress? If so, why has polarization increased in Congress since the 1970s? To address these questions, we unpack the “electoral connection” by exploring the mass public's attitudes toward partisan conflict via two survey experiments in which we manipulated characteristics of members and Congress. We find that party conflict reduces confidence in Congress among citizens across the partisan spectrum. However, there exists heterogeneity by strength of party identification with respect to evaluations of members. Independents and weak partisans are more supportive of members who espouse a bipartisan image, whereas strong partisans are less supportive. People with strong attachments to a political party disavow conflict in the aggregate but approve of individual members behaving in a partisan manner. This pattern helps us understand why members in safely partisan districts engage in partisan conflict even though partisanship damages the collective reputation of the institution.