Brands That Bind: Untangling the Effectiveness of Blurred Electoral Appeals

• In Event: Ambiguity and Issues

Abstract

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in elections and arises from many sources. Political parties and candidates themselves are one crucial source, and understanding why politicians choose to obscure their stances and how they do so is crucial. Existing literature generally focuses on aggregate outcomes, such as total vote share and the clarity of a—often unnamed or nondescript—candidate or party’s location on one or more broad ideological dimensions.

This paper argues that these high-level outcomes and predictors obscure strategically important heterogenous effects. Specifically, I argue that the centrality of an issue to a party or candidate’s brand and the specific blurring strategy that party or candidate uses influence the viability of unclear or blurred electoral appeals. Not all issues are equally important to voter’s understanding of a party or candidate’s brand, and it is on peripheral issues that blurring strategies can be deployed to potentially bring in new voters while minimizing the risk of partisan defection or disaffection. On issues central to the brand, the trade-offs sharpen, and two common blurring strategies, ambiguous and ambivalent appeals, have distinct implications for a candidate’s co-partisans. Because ambiguous appeals provide no information on issue positions, they can be a useful strategy in that partisans are likely to default to their priors about the party, i.e., the party’s brand. Ambivalence, on the other hand, involves entertaining opposing considerations on an issue without clearly endorsing either. In presenting a consideration that diverges from the brand, ambivalent appeals on an issue central to the brand are therefore likely to undermine support among partisans.

Untangling the interactions between brand centrality, blurring strategy, and partisanship matters because politicians are strategic, and they recognize that election campaigns are not one strategy fits all. Using survey experiments to drill down beneath the level of large ideological dimensions and beneath the mass public reveals the inherent and difficult to resolve trade-offs of modern campaigns, which are obscured through an aggregate focus. This paper also helps to resolve existing discrepancies between theory, which suggests the costs of presenting unclear issue positions typically outweigh the potential benefits, with a reality of electoral competition awash in vague, ambivalent, and opaque campaigning.

Author

• Jacob Robert Gunderson, University of Gothenburg