Issue Ownership, Media Coverage and Voters' Perceptions of Parties

According to issue ownership theory, voters tend to cast their ballot for parties that “own” issues of importance to them, i.e. parties that they associate with certain issues and that they consider best able at handling them. As a consequence, parties have incentives to focus their campaign activities on the issues they own. Given that most voters learn about politics from the media, media coverage of owned issues is a crucial asset for political parties. Indeed, recent research has shown that media coverage of party-issue linkages can shape voters’ perceptions of issue ownership (e.g., Walgrave et al. 2009; Tresch et al. 2013) and parties’ public support (e.g., Thesen et al. 2014). However, these studies have only looked at the amount of issue attention in the media, not at how parties were portrayed. Against this background, this paper argues that it not only matters how much media attention parties get for their “own” issues, but also if this coverage is predominantly positive or negative. Based on a content analysis of front page news in 20 dailies during the last six weeks before the 2011 parliamentary elections in Switzerland as well as data from a rolling cross-section campaign survey, this paper investigates if a) issue-owning parties enjoy higher and b) more favorable media coverage as compared to other parties and c) how this coverage affects voters’ perceptions of these parties.