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.     

What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites

What politicians devote attention to, is an important question as political attention is a precondition of policy change. We use an experimental design to study politicians’ attention to incoming information and deploy it among large samples of elected politicians in three countries: Belgium, Canada, and Israel. Our sample includes party leaders, ministers and regular members of parliament. These elites were confronted with short bits of summary information framed in various ways and were then asked how likely it was that they would read the full information. We test for three frames: conflict, political conflict, and responsibility. We find that framing moderates the effect of messages on politicians’ attention to information. Politicians react more strongly (i.e., they devote more attention) to political conflict frames than to non-political conflict frames and they react stronger to political responsibility attributions than to non-political responsibility attributions. Conflict frames attract more attention than consensus frames only from members of opposition parties. Political conflict frames attract more attention from government party politicians. These effects occur largely across issues and across the three countries.     

Associations Between Psychosocial Well-Being,Stressful Life Events and Emotion-Driven Impulsiveness in European Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Knowing the extent to which mental well-being and stressful life events during adolescence contribute to personality characteristics related to risk-taking...     

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.     

Voting Aid Applications and the Effect of Statement Selection

Voting Aid Applications (VAA) helping voters make their decision at the ballots have become more popular throughout Western Europe. They typically consist of a number of statements that are used to match voters with parties. Drawing on a large-scale simulation of 500,000 different configurations of 36 statements and on a random sample of Belgian voters, the paper shows that many of these combinations produce diverging information for the participants. The study establishes that the specific selection of statements has a considerable impact on the ‘voting advice’ that is produced: some configurations favour certain parties, other configurations benefit other parties.     

Two Faces of Media Attention: Media Storm Versus Non-Storm Coverage

A media storm is a sudden surge in news coverage of an item, producing high attention for a sustained period. Our study represents the first multi-issue, quantitative analysis of storm behavior. We build a theory of the mechanisms that drive media storms and why the “anatomy” of media storms differs from that of non-storm coverage. Specifically, media storm coverage should change less explosively over time, but be more sharply skewed across issues, compared to non-storm coverage. We offer a new method of operationalizing media storms and apply our operationalization to U.S. and Belgian news. Even in these two very different cases, we find a common empirical storm anatomy with properties that differ from those of non-storm coverage in the predicted fashion. We illustrate the effects of media storms on the public through discussion of four key examples, showing that online search behavior responds strongly to media storms.     

Who is that (wo)man in the street? From the normalisation of protest to the normalisation

European Journal of Political Research - The time has long since passed that protests and demonstrations wereregarded as the possible beginning of violent revolutionary ferment. Venting...     

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.