UC Davis

Issue ownership has been thoroughly studied by political scientists since its re-emergence as a popular research topic, yet few scholars have considered the role that party “ownership” might play in how parties deliver their issue messages. In the three papers of this dissertation, I examine the idea that just as parties tend to be associated with (and gain electoral benefit from focusing on) certain issues, parties are also associated with (and might gain electoral benefit from employing) certain ways of framing issues. My first paper builds a theory of frame ownership, testing the idea that voters associate certain frames with certain parties in the same way they do issues. I test this theory with a nationally-fielded survey experiment. The results offer support for the existence of frame ownership across issues. The evidence suggests that parties may be able to successfully “trespass” on issues they don’t own, by talking about those issues using frames they do own. In my second paper, I use content analysis of news coverage of policy issues to examine whether politicians are using owned frames and if the media, as the conduit between politicians, parties, and campaigns and the general public, reflects the use of these owned frames. I treat this question as a further test of frame ownership as a phenomenon, namely that parties and the media are making the same associations between parties and frames as shown in the first paper. In other words, when Republicans and Democrats are mentioned in the news, are they more likely to be associated with frames owned by their own party? The findings of the paper suggest that, in line with the findings from the first paper, there are certain frames that are more likely to be associated with one party over the other. However, there is only one frame, Security and Defense, which is consistently associated with one party over the other across issues. This finding does not suggest that frame ownership isn’t appearing in the media and/or being used by politicians, but simply that owned frames are not the only ways in which politicians are communicating to their constituencies. In my third and final paper, I use an experiment to examine whether candidates are rewarded when they “stay in their own lane” by using owned frames (as identified in the first paper), and/or are punished for trespassing on out-party owned frames. The results of this paper offer inconsistent evidence of rewards in either direction. I argue that these findings do not necessarily mean that frame ownership does not shape voter attitudes and electoral outcomes. Rather, as the results from the second paper and this paper suggest, it is likely the case that some frames are stronger than others, prompting them to be more likely to be picked up by the media and more likely to influence voters. My research tells the story of frame ownership. It opens the doors for further research that asks exactly how politicians and parties can utilize these owned frames in order to gain electoral advantage over their opponents, and also demonstrates the limits of frame ownership’s influence in the presence of especially powerful frames and party cues.