The importance of issue-ownership and salience for voters' knowledge of parties' issue positions

Congruence between voters and representatives has long been seen as a clear marker of the quality of representation. In this paper we contend that to make this linkage we need to investigate the ability of voters to position parties in issue-space. We investigate how well voters in Belgium can do this by comparing their estimates of parties positions on twelve different issue-statements with the placement of the parties on these statements. We find that most voters have a hard time doing this and that the error is rather large. Investigating this further we find that issue ownership does more benefit for those with more factual knowledge than those without. In the same line, consumers of news-media benefit more from the ownership heuristic than those who use little news media. Finally we also find that the traditional gender gap in political knowledge literature does not seem to hold for knowing issue positions. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.