The Limits of Issue Ownership in a Polarized Era

The Democratic and Republican parties have longstanding reputations for their abilities to competently handle particular issues. These reputations help to simplify voter decision-making. Voters need only to determine which issues are most important in an election, then support the party with the strongest reputation for handling those issues. As elite polarization has grown in recent decades, the parties’ reputations should be even clearer, facilitating their use in vote choice. However, the corresponding partisan polarization in the electorate should limit the breadth of issue ownership beliefs, as well as the impact of these beliefs on vote choice. In this manuscript, we use a novel survey experiment to prime the parties’ owned issues. Our results show that the prime causes a shift in intended vote choice among pure independents, but not among partisans. These findings suggest that polarization has not erased issue ownership, but that partisanship has narrowed its potential impact.