Democracies in Europe are straining under external and internal pressures. Rising inequality, climate change, flagging productivity growth, Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, Trump. Although differing in their severity the mounting pressure has had several impacts on Europe’s political landscape, the most prominent issue being the rise of right-wing parties. In this essay I want to explore how the concept of issue ownership can be used to explain current changes in Europe’s political landscape and challenge the strategies of ongoing efforts halt the rise of right-wing parties. For that purpose, we must first understand what issue ownership means and its relevance in the competition for votes. Then we can use the concept to criticize current strategies. I will conclude with some opinions on dealing with Europe’s right, their agenda and their voters.  

Understanding Issue Ownership
At its core, issue ownership refers to political parties having “ownership” over an issue because voters consider them most competent in addressing it. It is then assumed that whenever a topic is discussed over which a party has issue ownership it benefits this party in the competition for votes. This is regardless of whether the parties name or agenda is mentioned or not. Issue ownership is ultimately a personal judgment because each voter must decide whether they consider a party to be competent in addressing a given issue or not. If on a country level most voters, consider one party to be most competent in addressing a specific issue, then this party has ownership over the issue. A crucial underlying assumption here is that the quality of policy proposals and the party’s manifesto are only relevant in so far as they impact the perceived competence of a party to address an issue. It is very much possible that a party’s policy proposals are utter rubbish and yet voters still consider them to be most competent. This could happen for instance because the previous track-record of the party is convincing or simply because some members perform well in debates and press conference. Given the fact that most voters are not able to analyse party manifestos and policy proposals of all parties on all issues and judging their quality, there is bound to be a discrepancy between the quality of solutions by a party for an issue and how competent voters perceive this party to be. I believe this discrepancy to be rather large. Thus, a party might have issue ownership over an issue for which they have no convincing strategy to tackle it. I would go so far as to say that competence is hardly a criterium given voters inability to judge, but instead party identity. Conservative parties centre around security and a liberal economy. Green parties, focus on sustainability, while socialist parties revolve around workers’ rights and social security. That is of course an oversimplification, but you get the gist. Voters have an image of a party and if their current concerns match with the identity of a party they are likely to vote for that party while mostly disregarding actual competence. If we now consider how people make their voting decisions employing the framework of issue ownership, we must ask two questions. What are the voter’s current concerns. Which party has issue ownership over which issues. When concerns match issue ownership then the voter is likely to vote for that party. As mentioned before, issue ownership can be achieved through perceived competence which is influenced by actual competence but also by party identity (among other factors of course but I will focus on these two). The balance between competence and party identity is crucial which will become clear in the next paragraph where we will look at current strategies to halt the rise of right-wing parties.

Current Strategies
In response to the rise of right-wing parties, other parties have tried to capture their voters by developing their own solutions for problems raised by the right. Whether these issues should be addressed to begin with I will get to later. Currently, most mainstream parties assume that it is the quality of their policy proposals which ultimately convinces voters. They might be so convincing that a party gains ownership over an issue but at the very least they can contest proposals by right-wing parties. The assumption is that they can capture voters on any issue if they are able to communicate effective solutions. If voters are concerned about issues surrounding migration, centre parties focus on this issue by developing and communicating their own ideas of how to address this issue. If voters are convinced by effective policies this strategy would be sound, given that many right-wing parties lack any convincing strategies of how to tackle migration. But what if voters do not care about the quality of the policies but instead, vote based on issue ownership? If issue ownership was derived only from competence, then the result would be the same. But it is not competence, but perceived competence influenced by party identity, which matters. Then the strategy of developing convincing solutions to issues raised by the right does not weaken them but has precisely the opposite effect.

Why Current Strategies are Counterproductive
By communicating strategies to tackle, for example, issues surrounding migration, mainstream parties draw attention to this topic. It then rises in the voters ranking of issues they are concerned with. Rember that the first question we must ask is what the voter’s current concerns are. If politicians from all parties and consequently media and social media only talk about migration, then this issue will be prevalent. Continuing with migration we then must ask which party has ownership over this issue, meaning that they are perceived to be most competent in dealing with it. For most left-wing and centre parties, migration does not fit their party identity or only on a tangent. To stress this, point most voters will not be convinced by a green party’s policy proposals to tackle the issue of migration because it is not their domain. It might even be the case that left-wing parties cannot formulate solutions to issues such as too much immigration because it goes against their party identity. The issue does not fit to the party and contradicts their identity even if their proposals are convincing. It is a fickle thing to pin down party identity of course and it differs between voters, but I think you have a feeling of what I am getting at. Coming back to issue ownership and the notion that it is party identity rather than competence which impacts the perceived competence of parties then the problem becomes obvious.

Parker must vote soon and all they heard about recently was migration. Even the centre parties for which they voted last time are discussing nothing else. They say it’s too expensive to integrate refugees, and that they are a security risk and so on. Parker wanted to have look at the party manifestos of each party but did not find the time and finds it difficult to judge whether policies like more border controls or better integration will help the issue. Still, they are concerned because everyone seems to be concerned with the issue. Parker is now standing in the ballot box and must decide which party to vote for. The green parties? Well, they have something to do with sustainability. The socialist and centre, right? They are all about workers right and such. Maybe conservative parties since they are all about security, that feels like a better fit. And yet the party that has been talking non-stop about migration even long before the election was the right-wing party.

I find this explanation of why addressing issues raised by the right is counterproductive strategy quite intuitive. These parties have been talking about nothing else but issues surrounding migration, refugees, LGBTQ+ and so on. In most people’s minds these right-wing parties are perceived to be most competent in tackling these issues. They have issue ownership over them. Constantly talking about these issues does not win voters back but instead just increases the number of voters who are now concerned with issues over which the right has issue ownership. Centre parties are talking about ever more right-wing talking points which normalizes them and at the same time confirms that there is something to worry about. But when it comes to elections, people will always choose the original brown shit by right-wing parties rather than the microwaved instant shit offered by centre parties.

Shifting Public Discourse
Of course there is a large variety of strategies to recapture voters from the right, but I want to stay withing the framework I created so far which offers to main avenues. We can make people be less concerned about issues over which the right-wing parties have issue ownership. Or we can contest the issue ownership. Let us start with the first. Here the goal is to shift public discourse. I think there are issues people are taught to be concerned about such as migration and there are issues that people are concerned about because of experience (or a combination of both). When we shift the discourse, we must tackle both.

Many of the right-wing talking points are taught issues. Think for example of rural dwellers who never met a migrant but are still concerned about foreigners imposing their culture on Germans. There is no experience to trigger this concern, it is entirely taught. We must teach people to be concerned about other things like climate change (something that is only starting to be experienced now). In addition, we must also give a bigger platform to issues experienced by voters which go unaddressed and are rarely mentioned in public discourse. Think of the inability to find affordable housing and pay rent or public safety for people from the FLINTA community.  This is not just up to politicians but also media and civil society but there is a feedback loop that must be broken here. Media reports on what politicians say which influences people’s opinion which is then represented in media and influences politicians (very much simplified). If any of these players can contribute to break the loop. How? Simply ignore right-wing talking points and raise issues over which centre parties hold issue ownership or which are experienced by voters. In political debates for instance whenever someone raises concerns about the security risks of migration instead of elaborating on convincing ideas of how to solve these issues one should instead just change the topic. Deaths from terrorist attacks by migrants are far surpassed by deaths from femicides for example. Of course, both are horrible but in terms of relevance it can easily be claimed that femicides and misogyny are a much more important security risk given their prevalence.

Furthermore, we must also figure out what voters are really concerned with. Every day we hear about migration so if you ask a random person on the street, they will undoubtedly mention this as a major issue. But continue the conversation and many people are more concerned about losing their house due to rent hikes than lose their life in a terrorist attack. It might seem a bit arrogant to say that the concerns that people raise are not what they are actually concerned about. And there is truth to that. But to strengthen my claim I would like to highlight how we know what people are concerned about: Surveys. It is stunning how much of what is discussed in political campaigns is based on surveys which often pose a handful of yes or no questions to a few hundred participants. Even elections can be seen as a form of survey. These surveys can be called quantitative research, where we ask a large number of people a few short questions. But there is also qualitative research. A method centred around taking a deep dive with a few participants into a specific issue. There is very little research that tries to capture what people are concerned with using a qualitative approach mainly because doing so with a representative sample is almost impossible due to resource constraints. But I would hypothesize that such research would reveal significant discrepancies between issue rankings in quantitative surveys versus qualitative surveys. To change the issues people are concerned with we thus need to do two things. We need to ignore taught issues by the right and introduce our own, preferably relevant ones which are currently not experienced by many like climate change. We also must figure out what people are concerned with based on their everyday experience so that we can give a bigger platform to them. To do so I would recommend doing more qualitative research rather than quantitative surveys.

Contesting Right-Wing Issue Ownership?
The other point of leverage would be to challenge right wing issue ownership over specific issues such as migration. Although possible I think this is not a very smart approach for one simple reason. Often, they do not matter. They are taught issues which many people do not experience and can therefore not be tackled anyway. Consider the outrage of the right over efforts to make language more inclusive. You now have a significant number of people who hate the fact that we should use inclusive language although in their life they have never been forced to use it. Right-wing parties are exceptionally good at making up an issue, talking about it all the time and make it feel relevant to voters for whom it is, in reality, utterly irrelevant. Why should any party that takes itself serious try to gain issue ownership over irrelevant issues? Furthermore, the only convincing way to do so would be to offer solutions. But how can a made-up issue have a solution? Trying to solve the “issue of migration” is like trying to get rid of the ghost underneath your kid’s bed. You cannot tackle it by addressing it, you tackle it by distracting from it until we all forget that it ever was an issue. Best case scenario a party does end up in control of a largely irrelevant issue. That would deprive right wing parties of it but has little impact on how well of the voters are. Worst case the attempt to contest issue ownership just draws additional attention to an irrelevant issue over which right-wing parties have issue ownership leading to even more voters electing them. What is happening right now is a combination of both scenarios. To a non-issue like migration and recapture voters from the right, mainstream parties try to prevent migration from happening. This means starving European economies of foreign workers, breaking humanitarian law, and abandoning ethical treatment of those looking for security and better opportunities, while right-wing parties are still growing. Everyone loses. And the problem? Well, it is still there. It is made up so there is no solution. Now it is not foreign migrants who are the issue but those who already have citizenship but “refuse to integrate”. The new talking point is “remigration”. Once mainstream parties jump on that idea the next issue will be to fortify Europe’s borders and so on. There is no solution to a made-up issue, so it is remarkably stupid to try to address it. Instead of trying to tackle made up issues over which the right holds issue ownership we must distract and shift our focus on more pressing matters. If we do so we not only avoid wasting time and energy tackling made up issues, but we also avoid doing harm by trying to tackle them and ultimately recapture voters from the far right by stopping to parrot their talking points and shifting the political discourse to issues that they do not hold issue ownership over. Lastly, I want to comment on the made-upness of issues and people’s concerns. I have been claiming that there are no issues surrounding migration and of course that is not true. There are many issues. From safer migration routes, to integration, to security risks. But the issue is heavily over-inflated and many of the issues surrounding it are made up. For example, migrants do not threaten the “cultural sphere of the occident”. I am also aware that claiming people’s concerns are made up is well-founded but of course not always true. Someone who lost a loved one or family member to a terrorist attack for instance has a very real concern about safety based on experience. I do not believe the solution is to stop migrants from entering the country, but this concern must be acknowledge. For simplicity’s sake I presented both the made-upness of issues and “reality” of people’s concerns as black and white, and I just want to point out that I know it is not always like that. Usually, I think, it is purple