No Substitute for Competence: On the Origins and Consequences of Issue Ownership [Paperback]

Simon Lanzs 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.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.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.For the first time, this book provides a systematic analysis of the origins and consequences of party competence evaluations. It demonstrates that perceptions of issue-handling competence are universal and independent drivers of the vote choice and that issue voting is not necessarily prerogative of the well informed.Issue ownership theory is a tale of two actors. On the one hand, it theorizes how parties compete with each other in their struggle for votes. On the other hand, issue ownership isabout the citizen. It claims that voters are more likely to support a party if they think it is competent to handle issues they care about.This book provides unique insights into the undertheorized and understudied links betweenparty competence and the vote. It argues that issue ownership voting (or competlc-