Issue Ownership Theory

DIFFERENT ISSUES ARE “owned” by Democrats and Republicans. Citizens tend to assume that one party is likely to do a better job handling certain kinds of problems than the opposing party. Democrats, for instance, own such issues as education and Social Security; Republicans, in contrast, own issues such as national defense and foreign policy. For example, in Tanuary of 2007, an NBC News/WaZZ Street Journal poll found that 42 percent thought Democrats could do a better job dealing with Social Security; whereas only 18 percent thought Republicans could handle this issue better. The phenomenon of issue ownership influences the content of campaign messages, and, at the presidential level, affects voters' issue agendas, as well as election outcomes.

Members of particular groups (such as business, labor, and minorities) are prone to affiliate with a given political party because it is seen to promote their interests; political parties tend to promote those interests to attract and maintain supporters. So, issue-handling reputations develop over time and reflect both the party's constituency and the behavior of prominent party members; issue-ownership reputations are relatively stable. The key prediction of issue ownership theory is that campaign messages from political candidates should stress the issues owned by their political party. If candidates can increase the importance of their party's issues to voters by emphasizing those issues in campaign messages, that should give them an advantage at the polls. This analysis draws on the idea of agenda setting, which posits that the more an issue is emphasized in the news, the more important that issue will become to citizens. Democrats are expected to stress their own issues, and Republicans should emphasize their own issues, to make the issues voters believe they handle more effectively appear even more important.

Research supports this theory. First, although there is some overlap in the issues discussed in political campaign messages, Democratic and Republican candidates for office are prone to emphasize the issues owned by their own parties. Republicans tend to own more national issues (such as national defense and foreign policy) than Democrats, so presidential candidates from both political parties frequently discuss Republican issues; nevertheless, Republican candidates stress Republican issues even more than Democrats, and vice versa. Second, experimental studies have found that political television spots were more persuasive when attributed to a candidate from the party that owns the issue discussed, compared with the same spot attributed to a candidate from the opposing party.

Third, the more presidential television spots in a given campaign emphasize one political party's issues over the other, the more important those issues are to voters. Finally, voters' issue agendas tend to predict vote outcome.

Research on gubernatorial and congressional spots reveals that candidates for those offices also tend to emphasize the issues owned by their political party. However, unlike presidential messages, non-presidential campaign messages tend to stress Democratic issues more than Republican issues; there is less emphasis on national issues. Furthermore, no relationship has been found between issue-ownership emphasis in non-presidential campaign messages and election outcome in non-presidential campaigns, presumably because non-presidential candidates do not have the same power to influence voters' agendas as presidential candidates.

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