Issue Ownership Dynamics: How Political Parties Claim and Maintain Issues Through Media Appearances.

Drawing on a large-scale online experiment embedded in an electoral survey in Belgium, the paper sets out to test whether issue ownership is, rather than a stable condition, a dynamic process that can be manipulated by an experimental stimulus. 5,000 respondents are confronted with an embedded fake TV-news item in which the five leaders of the main Belgian parties expose their parties' stance on six issues. We find that issue ownership is a dynamic process and that news exposure leads to significant shifts in issue ownership. Especially on issues that are not owned by any party, a strong communicative performance by the party leader can make a difference. But even on issues that are owned by other parties, parties can gain by communicating about them. So, the paper establishes that media may have a more profound impact on agenda-setting and priming by not only activating existing issue-ownerships but also affecting the creation of issue ownerships in the first place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]