Issue ownership theory

Research on negative campaigning has largely overlooked the role of stereotypes. In this study, we argue that the gendered and partisan nature of traits and policy issues interact with a candidate's gender and partisanship to shape the effectiveness of negative messages. We draw on expectancy-violation theory to argue that candidates may be evaluated more harshly when attacks suggest the candidate has violated stereotypic assumptions about their group. Thus, attacks on a candidate's " home turf, " or those traits or issues traditionally associated with their party or gender, may be more effective in reducing support for the attacked candidate. We use two survey experiments to examine the effects of stereotype-based attacks – a Trait Attack Study and an Issue Attack Study. The results suggest that female candidates are particularly vulnerable to trait based attacks that challenge stereotypes associated with women and the Democratic Party. The negative effects of all forms of stereotype-based attacks were especially large for Democratic women. Both male and female candidates proved vulnerable to attacks on policy issues stereotypically associated with their party and gender. Our results offer new insights into the use of stereotypes in negative campaigning and their consequences for the electoral fortunes of political candidates.

“Moody’s Credit Ratings and The Subprime Mortgage Meltdown” reviews the 2008 financial crisis and the impact to homeowners by investment firms, lenders and other market and nonmarket stakeholders.  Moody’s CEO, Raymond McDaniel, created an environment within the organization that put greater value on increasing market share, improving shareholders return on investment and being primarily driven by bottom-line results.  Moody’s business model started changing in 1975 as a result of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) designating Moody’s, S&P and Fitch as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSRO’s), giving each organization a quasi-regulatory role.  As a result, Moody’s and the other two organizations started charging bond issuers to rate their products.  This created a conflict of interest for Moody’s and the other two rating agencies; bond issuers started to shop for the best ratings from the three agencies.  The rating agencies, in turn, failed to meet their obligation to provide independent, objective ratings on the financial instruments they were paid to rate (Lawrence & Weber, 2011, pp. 454-456). 
    This failure to provide independent, objective ratings was evidently clear during the housing bubble that occurred during the past decade.  Structured finance products like residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) became very popular as they appeared to supersede poor returns in the markets and the Federal Reserve Bank’s low interest rate policies.  The RMBS’ were highly sought after because of their higher than normal returns. These instruments consisted of bundled home loans purchased by investment banks, then the creation of a pool of home loans that appeared to be bond equity.  The problem with RMBS’ was that there was little transparency and they required sophisticated systems to securitize (Lawrence & Weber, 2011, pp. 456-462).
    The popularity of the RMBS’, public policy that promoted home ownership, and home financing products that allowed for questionable loans created an atmosphere that lacked oversight.  Moody’s showed little restraint in this environment and jumped right into the housing bubble market.  In the five years, leading up to 2006, structured finance instruments drove almost 40% of their revenues, and resulted in leading operating margin performance amongst companies in the S&P 500 for five straight years (Lawrence & Weber, 2011, p. 456).  Because of Moody’s financial success, CEO Raymond McDaniel, enjoyed a salary of $7.4 million.  Under his leadership, the organization was primarily applying the ownership theory versus the stakeholder theory (Lawrence & Weber, 2011, p. 6).  Moody’s may not have broken the law, but they clearly did not reflect the ethics and leadership the public needed from them during the period leading up to the financial crisis.

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience, i.e., debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel survey da- ta from Germany and Great Britain, we analyze the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their party support, and we conclude that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments, and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term associa- tive issue ownership. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche par- ty, the German Greens.

This paper inspects political issues and themes associated with the 2016 US Democratic and Republican primary candidates via Twitter data. The analyzed data set comprises tweets mentioning individual candidates between February 12th, 2016 and May 26th, 2016. Tweets were processed by using two distinct methods for large scale text data: predetermined keywords and topic models. With eight predetermined issue categories, it was possible to show in which central political themes candidates were most connected to, by themselves or by others, on Twitter. Results show that on party average the Democratic candidates were more often connected to environmental, economic issues and social programs. Conversely, Republican candidates were more associated with immigration. Intra-party differences proved to be pronounced for Democratic candidates. On average candidates from both parties presented the most interest in economic issues, whereas Twitter users mentioned them with social and cultural issues the most. After quantitative analysis of the issue categories, topic models were fitted to the categorized data. Topic models confirmed results of the lexicon-based approach and provided detail by distinguishing key topics for candidates. It remains to be seen whether the signals extracted from the Twitter data can be confirmed by other sources and offline opinions of the voters.

En science politique, l’analyse de documents politiques est cruciale afin de tester toute une série d’hypothèses concernant les priorités des acteurs et institutions politiques, mais les méthodes utilisées afin d’analyser ces textes politiques sont (trop) nombreuses. Les techniques d’analyse de textes basées sur le codage humain sont les plus répandues et fournissent les meilleures données en ce qui concerne le contenu de ces documents. Toutefois, les techniques automatisées présentent également d’incontournables avantages. Cet article entend comparer les résultats obtenus via deux méthodes distinctes d’analyse d’un même corpus de textes politiques, à savoir une méthode d’encodage manuel et une méthode d’encodage automatisé. Les programmes électoraux des principaux partis politiques belges entre 1987 et 2007 seront utilisés comme textes de base. L’identification et comparaison des principales thématiques abordées dans ces documents permettront de déterminer les similarités et différ...

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party “owns” the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. However, based on the broad literature on partisan bias, we predict that parties’ efforts to change issue own-
ership perceptions will have a difficult time breaching the perceptual screen created by a voter’s party preference. Using two separate experiments with a similar design we show
that the effect of partisan issue messages on issue competence is moderated by party preference. The effect of issue messages is reinforced when people already like a party, and blocked when people dislike a party.

Issue ownership, which has a competence and an associative dimension, refers to the link between issues and parties in voters' minds. Although used frequently in voting research, there remain worries about the validity of its current measures. The measures may be confounded with respondents' (dis)agreement with parties' position and general party evaluations. Through a question wording experiment we compare measures of both issue ownership types and test which are most affected by the two confounding factors. We find that competence issue ownership measures are heavily affected by confounding factors while associative issue ownership wordings are less. Challenging existing research, we find that especially the classic 'best at handling'-wording tapping competence issue ownership is most conflated with positions and party preference.

Le changement climatique (CC) deviendra-t-il l'un des thèmes de l'écologie politique le plus conflictuel dans les années à venir ? Plusieurs éléments permettent à l'heure actuelle de mettre en évidence plusieurs tensions et conflits potentiels. Si peu de partis politiques, en dehors de certains partis d'extrême droite et populistes, s'opposent encore à la reconnaissance du changement climatique et de la responsabilité humaine, le caractère consensuel de cet enjeu tend toutefois de plus en plus à évoluer vers un caractère positionnel au sein de la compétition partisane et en périodes électorales. L'attention politique sur l'enjeu climatique s'est transformée ces trente dernières années (1980-2014) sur l'échiquier politique belge passant d'une période de prise de conscience durant les années 1990 à une période volontariste durant les années 2000 suivie aujourd'hui d'une période plus « positionnelle », voire conflictuelle sur les politiques climatiques et leurs orientations. Les partis politiques belges semblent en effet revenir à leur « core bussiness » et, si les partis écologistes conservent une attention politique élevée sur l'enjeu climatique, c'est de moins en moins le cas pour les autres partis politiques belges. L'enjeu climatique n'est donc plus à analyser par une approche bipolaire (reconnaissance du CC vs. dénégation du CC) mais doit être envisagé en tenant compte des tensions entre les différents enjeux de politique publique qui s'opposent, des projets politiques des partis, de leurs publics cibles et de leurs intérêts particuliers. Notre étude s'inscrit à la suite des recherches sur la compétition partisane sur enjeux et se voit complétée par l'analyse de la fabrique d'une politique et la sociologie argumentative venant répondre à toute une série de limites théoriques, méthodologiques et empiriques associées à la compétition partisane, à l'étude des positions des partis et à la « politisation » d'enjeux de politique publique.

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience, i.e., debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel data from Germany and Great Britain, we analyze the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their par- ty support over the period 1984-2009, and we conclude that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments, and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term policy emphases as articulated in their election manifestos. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche party, the Greens.