To anyone who follows American politics, the association of specific issues with either the Democratic or Republican party makes a certain intuitive sense. The idea that Americans would trust the Republican Party to better “handle” the issue of taxes than the Democrats while putting their faith in the Democrats on the issue of health care is unsurprising. However, the reasons for these associations and thus their ultimate meaning remain remarkably vague despite decades of scholarship on the topic of issue ownership. The goals of this and the next two chapters are to bring clarity to the meaning of issue ownership by developing theoretically precise hypotheses about the concept; generating improved estimates of the parties’ reputations over time, and using these estimates to test the hypotheses with data on American public opinion and public policy.

MEASURING THE ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN PARTIES AND ISSUES

How do we translate the intuition that there exist long-term associations between parties and issues in the public’s mind into quantifiable measures? The study of issue ownership is based largely on survey questions first identified as valid measures by John Petrocik in his pathbreaking article “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections” (Petrocik 1996). These questions take the following form: “Which political party, the Democrats or the Republicans, do you trust to do a better job handling ... [issue X]?” Closely related questions ask Americans which party they think is better able to “deal with” a certain issue or “do a better job” on it.