Issue ownership in times of crisis: dynamics of party issue ownership during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic became one of the most salient issues for the public in the past few years, so that political parties had to address this issue if they wanted to maximize their vote share and thus the support of the citizens in upcoming elections. Due to the pandemic’s all-encompassing nature, many parties were forced to adjust their policy stances to the multitude of issues facing the public, the economy, and the health care sector. In this contribution, we analyse to what extent parties associated the COVID-19 pandemic with their issue ownership drawing upon German parliamentary parties’ press releases. Using a novel multi-step text analysis approach, we estimate which additional topics parties address in their press releases when publishing their position on the COVID-19 pandemic. We find mixed evidence for our expectation: only in a limited number of prominent issue areas, including domestic affairs, labour policy, macroeconomic issues and civil rights, do the parties we identify as more likely to associate these issues with the pandemic actually make such associations.