Issue Ownership and the Vote: The Effects of Associative and Competence Ownership on Issue Voting

Parties often are associated with specific issues. They can own an issue when they develop a reputation of competence and attention in that domain. This paper develops an individual-level model of the effects of issue ownership, distinguishing between two aspects of this concept: which party is considered to care most about a given issue (associative ownership), and which one is perceived to have the best solutions (competence ownership). When a party is the associative owner of a given issue, voters' preferences on the corresponding issue should have a larger impact on the evaluation of the issue owner. But when a party is considered to be most competent in that domain, the effect of spatial distances should decrease. These hypotheses are tested with a statistical model that allows the impact of voter-party issue distances on party utilities to vary across both parties and issues. This model is tested with data from the 2011 Swiss election study.