Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / ECPR Press
Pages: 156
Trim: 6⅛ x 8¾
978-1-78552-344-1 • Hardback • January 2020 • $80.00 • (£62.00)
978-1-5381-5688-9 • Paperback • September 2021 • $40.00 • (£31.00)
978-1-78552-345-8 • eBook • January 2020 • $38.00 • (£29.00)
Simon Lanz is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
1. Introduction
2. Perspectives on Issue Voting and Issue Ownership Voting
3. The Role of Competence Evaluations in Elections
4. Empirical Framework
5. The Sources of Issue Ownership
6. Issue Ownership Voting
7. Issue Ownership Voting Across Contexts
8. Conclusion
Simon Lanz’s innovative and important new book offers a comprehensive, cross-national study of issue ownership. His careful, convincing analysis shows where party competence perceptions come from and when and why they matter for how people vote. This study will be essential reading for all those who want to understand how perceptions of competence explain voting decisions and election outcomes.— Markus Wagner, Department of Government, University of Vienna, Austria
This book represents a major contribution to the analysis of how citizens perceive parties’ issue competence, and how these perceptions influence their voting choices. It is theoretically and empirically ambitious, and it demonstrates convincingly that issue competence should be seen as a central factor in the study of electoral competition.
— Romain Lachat, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Sciences Po, France
Issue ownership has become an important focus in studies of voting behavior. Its origins and effects, however, are likely to vary across electoral contexts. Simon Lanz shows in his broadly comparative study how parties come to "own'' issues, how this issue ownership affects their vote choices and how these effects depend on the electoral context. Using novel approaches enables Lanz to make a path-breaking contribution to the study of issue ownership.
— Simon Hug, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Université de Genève, Switzerland