Party Reputations and Policy Priorities: How Issue Ownership Shapes Executive and Legislative Agendas

Abstract

Election-oriented elites are expected to emphasize issues on which their party possesses 'issue ownership' during campaigns. This article extends those theories to the content of executive and legislative agendas. Arguing that executives have incentives to pursue their party's owned issues in the legislature, it theorizes three conditions under which these incentives are constrained: when governments are responsive to issues prioritized by the public, when a party has a stronger electoral mandate and under divided government. The theory is tested using time-series analyses of policy agendas of US congressional statutes and State of the Union addresses and UK acts of Parliament and the Queen's Speech . The results offer support for the theory, and are particularly strong for the US State of the Union address, providing insights into institutional differences. The implications provide reassurance concerning the conditions under which governments focus attention only on their partisan issue priorities.Keywords: issue ownership; saliency theory; agenda setting; legislative priorities An extensive literature predicts the issue agendas of parties and candidates during election campaigns. Election-oriented elites attempt to emphasize issues on which their party has 'issue ownership' 1 and avoid issues on which another party has an advantage. Parties are not wholly free to achieve this 'selective emphasis'.2 The issue agenda of an election campaign is a matter of competition between rivals, as well as the wider campaign context of media attention, policy events, and what voters already care most about and decide upon. But insofar as a party's owned issues (the issue associations voters hold about different political parties and their reputation for trust and competence) overlap with their partisan priorities -those issues on which elites, members and activists care most about 3 -a party that achieves its goal of winning office should try to pursue the party's owned issues in the legislature. A governing period is precisely the time when Petrocik 4 expects a party to demonstrate its ownership of issues via legislative attention and commitment.* School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester (email: jane.green@manchester.ac.uk); Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton (email: w.j.jennings@soton.ac.uk). The data on US policy agendas were originally collected by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, with the support of National Science Foundation grant numbers SBR 9320922 and 0111611, distributed through the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. The data on UK policy agendas were collected by Peter John, Will Jennings and Shaun Bevan with the support of ESRC research award RES-062-23-0872. Data on issue competence were collected by Jane Green and Will Jennings with the support of ESRC research award RES-000-22-4616. We thank Shaun Bevan for advice on model specification and Frank Baumgartner for valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. T...

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“…This is supported by the studies on issue ownership that have stated, for example, that parties try to capitalize on an agenda regarding those issues on which they are most competent (Budge & Hofferbert, 1990;Klingemann, Hofferbert, & Budge, 1994). Additionally, a large number of studies in the CAP community have used issue ownership theory to explain why political elites pay attention to some issues and not others (Green & Jennings, 2012;Green & Jennings, 2019;Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2010). Issue ownership theory was originally developed to explain why political parties pay attention to particular issues during electoral campaigns.…”

Issue ownership and the priorities of party elites in the United States, 2004–2016

“…Egan (2013) found considerable support for durable associative issue ownership caused by long-term-prioritization and little for alternative performance-based hypotheses. Both executives and legislatures tend to prioritize their owned issues in the United States and United Kingdom (Cummins, 2010; Green and Jennings, 2017), as do parties in Denmark (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen, 2010), although they are also pulled toward solving problems independent of issue ownership (Damore, 2005; Jones et al, 2009). These findings are consistent with literature suggesting that political parties have some ability to set agendas, although they are also forced to respond to emergent problems (Fagan, 2018).…”

“…We know less about why the empirical relationship between governing priorities and issue ownership exists, but some scholars argue that it is driven by party elites' core priorities. Green and Jennings (2017) argue that parties emphasize owned issues either because they derive some kind of comparative electoral advantage from doing so, or that parties have long-standing elite priorities that they choose to distribute scarce resources to ceteris paribus, but they do not attempt to empirically test either possible explanation. Egan (2013) argued that elites in parties have different chief motivations for seeking power, and will make sacrifices to enact those motivations once in power.…”

“…Parties often compete in elections by selectively emphasizing issues in campaigns, rather than by offering different policy promises to the electorate (Damore, 2005;Jones et al, 2009). Once elected, parties selectively emphasize their owned issues at the expense of others (Egan, 2013;Green and Jennings, 2017;Walgrave and De Swert, 2007;Walgrave et al, 2012). Issue ownership is therefore one of the more important factors shaping a party system's policy agenda.…”