The goal of this book has been to advance our scholarly understanding of the role issue ownership plays in American politics. Along the way, it has confirmed some previous findings, refined others, and explored heretofore uncharted territory. I began by making clear the kinds of issues for which we should expect the notion of issue ownership to be relevant: issues around which there exists a broad consensus about national goals and government’s responsibility to pursue those goals. Where previous research has disagreed on the extent to which issue ownership can change over time, here I have shown that issue ownership is in fact relatively steady. For the vast majority of issues over the past four decades, the public’s beliefs that one party is better than the other at handling a specific issue have been stable.

I have verified that issue ownership is meaningfully related to presidential election results, although ambiguity remains regarding the direction of causality. Voters may use issue ownership as a kind of heuristic to determine which party is likely to tackle the nation’s most important problems. By contrast, it is also possible that they absorb the messages broadcast by the party winning a particular election that its owned issues are indeed important at the time. In either case, it is clear that the associations the public makes between the parties and particular consensus issues are beneficial to issue-owning parties.