The Limits of Issue Ownership in a Polarized Era

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221106435
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(5) 694–706

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221106435

journals.sagepub.com/home/apr

The Limits of Issue Ownership in a Polarized

Era

Jamie M. Wright

1

, Scott Clifford

1

, and Elizabeth N. Simas

1

Abstract

The Democratic and Republican parties have longstanding reputations for their abilities to competently handle particular issues.

These reputations help to simplify voter decision-making. Voters need only to determine which issues are most important in an

election, then support the party with the strongest reputation for handling those issues. As elite polarization has grown in recent

decades, the parties’reputations should be even clearer, facilitating their use in vote choice. However, the corresponding

partisan polarization in the electorate should limit the breadth of issue ownership beliefs, as well as the impact of these beliefs on

vote choice. In this manuscript, we use a novel survey experiment to prime the parties’owned issues. Our result s show that the

prime causes a shift in intended vote choice among pure independents, but not amo ng partisans. These f‌indings suggest that

polarization has not erased issue ownership, but that partisanship has narrowed its potential impact.

Keywords

issue ownership, political behavior, polarization

Partisanship is the primary shortcut that citizens use to help

structure their worldviews and simplify the complex political

systems in which they live. Political parties have long-

standing reputations for the ideologies they advance, the

character traits they possess, and the issues that they “own.”

According to issue ownership theory, each party is perceived

as most capable or competent at handling specif‌ic issues

(Petrocik, 1996;Petrocik et al., 2003;Budge, 1983;Stubager,

2018). In the United States, the Democratic Party is seen as

better able to handle issues related to the environment,

healthcare, poverty, and Social Security, while the Repub-

lican Party is seen as more competent on the issues of crime,

national defense, and terrorism (Egan, 2013;Petrocik et al.,

2003;Petrocik, 1996;Hayes, 2005). These stable stereotypes

about the parties’competencies help simplify voter decision-

making; voters merely need to identify the most pressing

problems facing the country and choose the party that is most

motivated and able to handle those problems.

Issue ownership may be particularly accessible and salient

in an era where Democratic and Republican elites have so

clearly polarized. As the parties have staked out more di-

vergent positions, and the public has become more aware of

these differences (Freeze & Montgomery, 2016;Levendusky,

2009;Hetherington, 2001), the public should be more able to

rely on perceptions of issue ownership when formulating

their vote choice. But, as Goggin and Theodoridis (2017)

note, “nearly all survey evidence of issue ownership analyzes

the electorate in the aggregate, without separating

respondents by their partisan identif‌ication”(p. 678). And

current levels of polarization in the electorate raise questions

about just how pervasive issue ownership and its effects are

once individuals’partisan loyalties are taken into

consideration.

As such, we examine the effects of issue ownership on

vote choice by using a novel design that experimentally

manipulates the salience of owned issues. Our results suggest

that while partisanship has not eliminated patterns of issue

ownership, partisan identity limits the potential effects.

Specif‌ically, we f‌ind that priming a party’s owned issues only

has a signif‌icant effect on the vote intentions of pure inde-

pendents. Thus, while ownership is constrained, parties still

stand to gain when the issues they own are made salient.

Issue Ownership in a Polarized Electorate

Despite much scholarly focus on issue ownership, we know

relatively little about how it operates in a highly polarized

environment. In theory, ideological polarization at the elite

level could increase the role of issue ownership by making the

1

Department of Political Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jamie M. Wright, Department of Political Science, University of Houston,

4800 Calhoun Rd, Houston, TX 77004, USA.

Email: jmwright432@gmail.com