Blessing or Curse? Green Parties, Climate Issue Ownership, and the 2021 IPCC Report

The issue ownership model predicts that increased salience of an issue benefits the party who is perceived as best at handling that issue by the public. For example, since Green parties own the climate issue, their support is a function of how dominant the climate issue is on the political agenda. This article adds to a more nuanced understanding of when a favorable agenda benefits an issue owner. Focusing on the climate issue, we argue that the electoral benefits of issue salience is not just a matter of a party’s issue ownership but also its nicheness. We use the concurrence of the 2021 Norwegian general election with the UN’s IPCC 2021 report on climate change to examine how an exogenous shock to climate saliency affected individual level support for Norway’s three climate-centric parties: The Socialist Left (SV), the Liberal Party (V), and the Green Party (MdG) – the latter being decidedly more niche than the others. Based on a five-wave panel study (N=15,000), we show that while the report clearly increased the salience of the climate issue for voters, the Green party, who led issue ownership ratings, were not able to capitalize on this. Although Green party support increased immediate after the report was published, it decreased again during the campaign and culminated in a disappointing election. In contrast, despite lower ownership ratings, the Socialist Left (left-wing) and the Liberal Party (right-wing) both sustained the support they initially gained after the IPCC report and had successful elections. Our findings thus suggest a conditional issue ownership model.