New Perspectives on Party Branding

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political parties connect citizens to the political system, and party brands structure that linkage. Where voters clearly understand what and whom parties stand for, party brands serve as heuristics that anchor, stabilize, and inform political opinion and behavior. However, politics in Western democracies have been anything but stable. Rocked by the Great Recession, the European debt crisis, the ripple effects of the Syrian Civil War, a global pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, politics today is increasingly volatile and multi-dimensional. For many, traditional party politics is no longer an arena where they feel represented, leading them to engage in direct political action. These moments of crisis and shifting modes of political engagement lead us to ask how the political transformations of the past decades have impacted parties’ brands and whether they can still bridge the gap between the people and their representatives.

This panel investigates the various ways that party brands structure political behavior in Western democracies and, in turn, how the changing shape of contemporary political conflict affects these brands. In doing so, we advance our understanding of how one party’s failures can ripple across parties with interconnected brands (Avina and Nonnemacher), how incorporating social movements into party brands can strengthen connections with civil society (Borbáth and Hutter), how the multidimensionality of contemporary politics obscures citizens’ perceptions of party brands with implications for partisanship (Dassonneville, Fournier, and Somer-Topcu), how brand dilution through convergent issue emphasis affects electoral volatility (Gunderson), and how and which parties integrate moral rhetoric in their appeal (Jung). The papers on this panel make significant contributions to the study of party brands and party competition by both highlighting the variety of ways that party brands structure politics today and by studying multiple components of party brands, such as parties’ names, international associations, issue positions, issue emphases, and moral rhetoric. The panel contributes to current debates on party brands that merit further research as we advance our knowledge of the transformation of party-citizen linkages.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Individual Presentations

• How Do Voters Respond to Party Brands? - Endre Borbáth, Heidelberg University; Swen Hutter

• Citizens’ Perceptions of Parties’ Positions and Partisanship - Ruth Dassonneville, KU Leuven; Patrick Fournier, Universite de Montreal; Zeynep Somer-Topcu, University of Texas at Austin

• Brands, Issue Emphasis, and Electoral Volatility - Jacob Robert Gunderson, University of Gothenburg

• Patterns in Parties’ Moral Rhetoric - Jae-Hee Jung, Rice University

Chair

• James Adams University of California, Davis

Discussant

• Florence So The University of Gothenburg