Negative Issue Ownership

Existing research considers issue ownership to be a positive attribute of political parties, which are seen as ‘owning’ those policy areas where they are particularly competent and engaged. However, for some citizens a party may also be a negative issue owner if it has a particularly bad reputation for its handling of an issue. This article describes and explains aggregate and individual-level patterns of negative issue ownership using a survey-based measure of handling perceptions from the 2013 Austrian National Election Study (n = 3,266). Naming a particular party as a negative issue owner is affected by partisanship, but also by policy preferences and government performance evaluations. The effects of issue importance vary across issues. These findings lay the groundwork for more research on negative attributions of issue ownership and their empirical consequences on vote choice.     

Introduction: Issue Ownership

Although issue ownership theory – the idea that voters consider specific parties to be better able to deal with some issues – had already emerged in the 1980s, it is only in the past 10 years that the theory has gained prominence in the study of voter and party behaviour. Despite the steep increase in scholarly attention, there is still no consensus regarding the impact of issue ownership on parties and voters. This special issue makes two key contributions: firstly, it provides state of the art contemporary issue ownership research, by focusing on the historical roots as well on recent conceptual, theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Secondly, by focusing on new aspects and effects of issue ownership, the special issue offers a look forward and outlines a research agenda for future work on issue ownership.     

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.     

The Limits of Issue Ownership Dynamics: The Constraining Effect of Party Preference

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party “owns” the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. However, based on the broad literature on partisan bias, we predict that parties' efforts to change issue ownership perceptions will have a difficult time breaching the perceptual screen created by a voter's party preference. Using two separate experiments with a similar design we show that the effect of partisan issue messages on issue competence is moderated by party preference. The effect of issue messages is reinforced when people already like a party, and blocked when people dislike a party.     

Issue Emphases,Saliency Theory and Issue Ownership: A Historical and Conceptual Analysis

Saliency approaches derive from the basic idea that political parties define their policies by emphasising certain topics more than others, particularly in public documents and debates. However, the approaches diverge on whether parties always emphasise the same ‘owned’ issues or can emphasise different ones in different elections with a view to winning votes. The article explores the way these differences developed and summarises them in a typology of ‘issue ownerships’, within which models linking ‘ownership’ to election outcomes can be located.     

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.     

Changes and Fluctuations in Issue Ownership: The Case of Sweden, 1979–2010

Issue ownership (IO) has been an important concept in the analysis of party behaviour, party strategy and party competition for several decades. More recently, it has also been of growing interest for research on voting behaviour. Traditionally, IO has been regarded as a stable phenomenon where parties have different issue profiles and are advantaged by different political issues or issue‐areas. Recently, however, many studies have reported change and fluctuations of IO, and the same studies also makes it clear that we know surprisingly little about what might cause, or facilitate, change in issue ownership. In fact, we do not even have systematic studies of how stable issue ownership is, or how frequent shifts in issue ownership actually are. The aim of this article is to explore the extent of change and stability in issue ownership in Sweden. For this purpose, the Swedish national election studies from 1979 to 2010 are utilised. Although recent research has indicated that changes in IO have increased over time, this is not supported in the Swedish case. Instead, issue ownership seems never to have been a particularly stable phenomenon. However, in line with our theoretical expectations, we show that ownership of economic issues is more volatile compared to ownership of other issues.     

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.     

公有制、社会所有制和公众所有制的关系辨析

公有制、社会所有制与公众所有制从不同角度反映了时生产资料个人独有的否定,三者之间是矛盾与统一的关系."公有制"概念是作为私有制的对立面而从政治意义上加以使用的,因此排斥私有成分;而"社会所有制"概念则是马克思从逻辑角度否定传统私有制的未来社会发展的产物."公众所有制"是一种个人占有形式,但是却突破了个人占有资本在数量上的局限;而"社会所有制"不可能完全脱离个人所有,但是实现了对个人占有的扬弃."公众所有制"是一种具体共有形式,而"公有制"则是一种抽象共有形式.作为具体共有的"公众所有制"只是反映了作为抽象共有的"公有制"的部分特征,并不能直接等同于公有制.     

论所有制性质和公有制的实现形式

公有制经济体制改革的成功与否,是整个经济体制改革成败的关键。党的十五大召开以来,公有制经济的改革取得很大进展,目前进入攻坚阶段。要完成攻坚大任,必须在理论认识上前进一步,即对所有制问题有一个科学的认识。要分清资本和资产的关系;正确认识所有制关系特别是生产资料的占有在所有制关系中的地位;不要简单地根据生产资料归谁所有来划分企业的性质。要正确认识公有制的实现形式。公有制的实现形式大致可以分为国家所有制、劳动共同所有制、社会基金所有制三大类。     

深圳公有制与非公有制经济良性发展的理论启示

随着社会主义市场经济的发展 ,公有制与非公有制经济的地位和作用都发生了引人注目的变化。深圳特区经过 2 0几年的市场取向的经济改革实践 ,公有制经济得到积极发展 ,非公有制经济也获得充分的发展空间 ,形成了国企、外资、私营三分天下的局面 ,实现了公有制经济与非公有制经济的良性发展。深圳经济的繁荣 ,给我们以深刻的理论启示。在建设社会主义市场经济体制的过程中 ,对待公有制与非公有制经济的发展 ,必须把思想从传统的僵化认识的窠臼中解放出来 ,以保障社会主义市场经济长期、快速、健康发展为目标 ,研究探索建立适应市场经济新机制…     

Ownership structure and receivables management

In this study, we examine the impact of ownership structure on the receivables management of Indian corporate firms. We argue that owners' incentives to monitor manager's actions increase with the increase in their stake holding. Therefore, firms with concentrated promoter and institutional ownership should have lower receivables in terms of its sales. Our results obtained using a panel of 1,164 firms show a negative relationship between the percentage of promoter holding and the receivables ratio. Further, for growing firms, both promoter and institutional shareholdings have a negative impact. However, the firm size effect did not show any impact on the relationship between ownership concentration and receivables ratio.