Partisan Priorities
How Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics

Partisan Priorities investigates issue ownership, showing that American political parties deliver neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they 'own'.

Patrick J. Egan (Author)

9781107042582, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 July 2013

264 pages, 20 b/w illus. 24 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

“Partisan Priorities is a provocative book that challenges our understanding of how political parties and issues matter in American politics. At its heart is a simple idea – that party ownership of issues matters in American politics and that this ownership is driven not by the policy positions parties take or their performance on the issues while in government, but by the priorities parties place on them. The idea turns out to be quite powerful. Egan carefully crafts a measure of ownership based on public assessments of which party would do a better job on various issues, and demonstrates that party priorities drive public assessments. He then shows that this issue ownership impacts politics and political representation in important ways. It is an ambitious piece of work to be sure and deserves a wide audience among scholars of American politics and beyond.” – Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at Austin

Americans consistently name Republicans as the party better at handling issues like national security and crime, while they trust Democrats on issues like education and the environment - a phenomenon called 'issue ownership'. Partisan Priorities investigates the origins of issue ownership, showing that in fact the parties deliver neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they 'own'. Rather, Patrick J. Egan finds that Republicans and Democrats simply prioritize their owned issues with lawmaking and government spending when they are in power. Since the parties tend to be particularly ideologically rigid on the issues they own, politicians actually tend to ignore citizens' preferences when crafting policy on these issues. Thus, issue ownership distorts the relationship between citizens' preferences and public policies.

1. Introduction
2. Consensus issues: amidst polarization, shared goals
3. The measure and meaning of issue ownership
4. Ruling out the policy and performance hypotheses
5. Partisan priorities: the source of issue ownership
6. How issue ownership distorts American politics
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Environmental economics [KCN], Politics & government [JP]