Party ownership or individual specialization? A comparison of politicians’ individual issue attention across three different agendas

Abstract

Studies have shown that parties selectively emphasize different issues to compete with each other to raise the salience for their preferred issues and to appear competent in handling them. This study applies the selective emphasis framework to individual politicians. We argue that politicians compete with both politicians from different parties and with their party members. We expect that issue ownership matters to competition with politicians from different parties and issue specialization to competition with politicians from their own party. We studied the individual issue agendas of 144 Belgian politicians for a period of 9 months on Twitter, in the news and in parliament. Our results show that issue specialization is a consistent driver of the three issue agendas of politicians, while the effect of issue ownership varies across agendas. This means that both factors are not mutually exclusive and that combining them can be an opportune strategy for politicians.