Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Political parties are said to “own” an issue when they develop a reputation of competence and attention in that domain. This concept plays an important role in the analysis of electoral competition and of how citizens’ perceptions and images of political parties and candidates. Recent studies have suggested that two aspects of issue ownership may play an important role in the voting decision process: which parties are perceived to care most about specific issues (associative ownership) and which ones are deemed best at handling the corresponding social problem (competence ownership). This paper will extend this research on the role of issue ownership, in the context of the 2017 French presidential and legislative elections. It aims to make two contributions. First, it will test differences in the impact of ownership between party preferences and candidate preferences. Second, it will take advantage of a question-wording experiment within the 2017 French election study in order to evaluate how strongly perceptions of competence ownership (of both parties and candidates) are biased by citizens’ own issue preferences.