How Do Voters Respond to Party Brands?

• In Event: New Perspectives on Party Branding

Abstract

Party democracy rests on the assumption that voters consider and respond to differences in party brands. However, how voters respond to various features of party brands remains underexplored. This study provides experimental evidence for the effects of brands on parties’ electoral appeal. We bridge the literature on party branding with the literature on the interaction between political parties and social movements. The study argues that key electoral groups reward investment in party brands that create associations to protest politics. To identify this effect, we field an online survey in Austria with two conjoint experiments. In the first experiment we focus on the brands of newly emerging parties; in the second experiment we focus on the re-branding efforts of existing parties. The experimental design allows us to isolate the effect of three features: party names, organizations, and action repertoires. These are randomly assigned and constitute our treatments. Our central hypothesis refers to the effect of party names. We expect that names that appeal to movement-like mobilization increase parties’ electoral appeal, particularly among non-partisan respondents. Similarly, we expect positive effects for movement-like organizational structures, and action repertoires. We explore heterogenous effects by partisanship, ideological stance, history of activism, and party age. The Austrian case allows us to identify the effect of party brands in a context typical for advanced Western European democracies, where new parties regularly enter the party system, yet mainstream parties continue to dominate. We argue that our results travel to other Western European democracies and contribute to current debates on the transformation of political parties and the interaction between electoral and protest politics.

Authors

• Endre Borbáth, Heidelberg University

• Swen Hutter