Changes and Fluctuations in Issue Ownership: The Case of Sweden, 1979–2010

• Issue ownership (IO) is an important concept in the analysis of party behaviour, party strategy and party competition for several decades. More recently, it has also been of growing interest to research on voting behaviour. Traditionally, IO has been regarded as a stable phenomenon where parties have different profiles and are advantaged by different political issues or issueareas. However, recently many studies have reported change and fluctuations concerning IO, and the same studies also makes it clear that we know surprisingly little about what might cause, or facilitate, change in issue ownership. In fact, we do not even have systematic studies of how stable issue ownership usually is, or how frequent clear shifts in issue ownership actually are.The aim of this article is to explore the extent of change and stability in issue ownership in Sweden. For this purpose, the Swedish national election studies from 1979 to 2010 are utilised. Hence, in light of more recent research that has delivered some tentative indications of that changes in issue ownership have increased over time, this is nothing that is supported in the Swedish case. Instead, issue ownership seems never to have been a particularly stable phenomenon in general. Moreover, these results demonstrate that the ownership in economic issues are more volatile compared to others kind of issues, something which is well in line with the theoretical expectations outlined in the article since performance issues should be more sensitive to changes in voter evaluations.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)