Digital Space And The Names Of Political Parties

Abstract

The paper examines specific features of renaming of German political parties in the digital media space. The digital media enviroment today offers additional opportunities for party renaming. This provides material for discussing which measures to modify the name of political parties in Germany in the modern digital space can be successful, and which can harm the party and its image. To achieve this goal, official websites and discussion forums of parties, magazine and newspaper articles, as well as reader comments by leading German online publications on social networks have been studied. The key approaches to party renaming process in a virtual environment have been identified. It is shown that the German digital space today serves as a platform for a detailed justification of the change of a party name and the presentation of a new approved variant or variants to the target audience, collection of suitable names with subsequent consideration by the representatives of the parties and integration of the opinions of the relative change of the name of the party. Turning directly to the audience with the question of changing the name, the founders of the parties are trying not only to find out the nominative preferences of the voters, but also to improve interaction with the modern electorally significant online audience and thereby expand it. It is noted that the so-called “external” discriminating renaming is gaining popularity in the digital German media space, as a result of which party nicknames arise.