Contesting reputational advantages: Issue ownership and negative campaigning

Research on issue-based negative campaigning typically emphasizes issue salience and parties’ own issue strengths. This paper shifts the focus to the targets of attacks. We argue that negative campaigning on policy issues is systematically structured by the competence of the opponent, as parties seek to challenge rivals’ reputational advantages within specific issue domains. Using a dyadic dataset of party press releases from five Austrian national election campaigns (2006–2019), combined with survey-based measures of perceived issue competence, we show that parties are significantly more likely to direct negative messages at highly competent opponents. In contrast, sender-party competence and voter issue salience do not consistently shape targeting patterns. These findings suggest that issue-based negative campaigning is driven less by parties’ own issue strengths than by their opponents’ relative standing, highlighting how attacks serve as a strategy of reputational contestation in issue competition.