The concept of issue ownership has been around in political science for some time, but the last decade has seen a boom in articles that investigate this concept—and for good reasons. Issue ownership links the study of party competition and electoral behavior together in a way that few other concepts do. During the last decade, scholars have thus studied how parties fight to gain or retain issue ownership and how voters react to this fight. Now it is time for scholars to move forward and integrate the study of issue ownership with our broader theoretical understanding of electoral behavior.
Exactly such an integration is what Jane Green and Will Jennings’s new book The Politics of Competence offers. It places the concept of “issue ownership” within the broader context of “competence” or, more precisely, issue competence. The book is thus not about how voters evaluate the competence of specific leaders, but how they evaluate party competence on specific policy issues. A similar “competence” logic can be found in the study of economic voting, but the book under review extends this logic to the entire policy agenda. The book further sees competence as consisting of three parts, of which issue ownership—understood as the long-term reputation of parties with regard to particular issues—is one. The other two are issue competence—how well voters think parties are performing on a particular issue—and generalized competence, how well voters think parties are doing in general (i.e., across all issues).
The book starts with a chapter on theory and concepts followed by a data chapter and then chapters on each of the three concepts (issue ownership, performance and generalized performance). Then follows a chapter focusing on how the three concepts relate to actual voting, before the book summarizes the findings. The authors explore these three concepts in a series of empirical studies using data from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Germany.
The book is rich in terms of its empirical analyses, which are impressive in all respects and generate a plentitude of insights. I found the discussion of generalized performance particularly interesting and convincing. It is clear that there is a dynamic in how people evaluate the performance of governments that cuts across multiple issues. Another very important finding from the book is the difference between being in government and being in opposition. How the government is performing is something that the public can evaluate by looking at policy indicators like unemployment, inflation, and the like. For the opposition, it is difficult to conduct performance evaluations for the simple reason that you do not really perform policy-wise when you are in opposition. The book thus clearly adds to the growing attention on the government versus opposition divide that is a natural extension of the logic of competence literature.
In many ways, the book represents the most comprehensive attempt to provide a coherent understanding and analysis of the politics of competence to date. It is clearly a must-read for anyone working on concepts related to competence such as issue ownership and performance.
A hallmark of any good book is that it raises a number of interesting questions for future research. This is definitely the case with this book. One learns a great deal but also gains an appetite for further work on many of the issues that the book addresses. For this reviewer, one of the most important questions is related to the comparative perspective. Despite its comparative dataset, the book does not really adopt this perspective to its logical conclusion because of the nature of the cases under consideration. The authors do point out that the comparative similarities generally appear larger than the differences across the various cases (pp. 245–47). However, this finding, of course, immediately raises the question of whether this difference reflects the fact that the countries studied here are actually quite similar in terms of political systems. It would definitely be interesting to see what would happen if the ideas and concepts of the book, which are clearly developed with the UK and US cases in mind, were tested on countries that are more radically different in terms of party systems and government type.
A broader comparative test of the ideas presented in the book would also strengthen the theoretical “edge” of the ideas presented. The critical reader would benefit from a further elaboration of the interplay between the concepts put forward and leading to formulation of hypotheses that would more directly test the ideas of the book. Or to put it differently, some readers might hope for a more coherent and precise statement of the “argument” of the book and a summary of the findings that not only supports the argument but also addresses rival hypotheses more clearly. Related to this, the book could also have benefited from more direct engagement with alternative theoretical perspectives on voter behavior. The authors start out by positioning themselves in opposition to the spatial competition approach but do not return more systematically to a discussion of the book’s theoretical relationship to that perspective. Such a debate might have helped sharpen the argument of the book. Finally, the authors highlight the notion of “competence shocks.” A general notion of this concept emerges from the empirical analysis, but one could have wished for more theoretical elaboration of this idea. Would it not be possible to theorize which performance developments generate such a shock and which do not?
The Politics of Competence is undoubtedly a very important book for the study of electoral behavior in Western countries. Its insights deserve to be taken into account when election studies are designed and executed. We are still some steps away from a comparative theory of the politics of competence, but the book has definitely made a large step forward. I hope that others will pick up the ball and push the debate even further, a move that is definitely needed. Having read the book, one is clearly convinced that a central, if not the main, element of electoral politics is the politics of competence.
