Party Brand Research Articles

The Impact of Candidate Appearance and Advertising Strategies on Election Results

Spending on political advertising has grown dramatically in recent years, and political campaigns have increasingly adopted the language and techniques of marketing. As such political marketing efforts proliferate, the factors that drive electoral success warrant greater attention and investigation. The authors employ a combination of laboratory studies and analysis of actual election results to reveal influences of candidate appearance and spending strategies in campaigns. They analyze how personality trait inferences based on candidate appearance interact with political party brand image, advertising spending, and negative advertising. The results indicate that appearance-based inferences about candidates influence election outcomes, but their impact is driven partially by trait associations at the party brand level. This interaction between appearance and party alters the effects of advertising spending, particularly the effects of negative advertising. The findings have implications for the marketing of political candidates in terms of their party's brand image.

From Logo to Logos. Conservatism through the Speeches of David Cameron (2005-2009)1

Young, modern, energetic, Cameron and his election are taken as the symbol of conservative change. A closer analysis of his speeches qualifies these statements. The party is still divided and traditionalism is still dominant. In a favourable context, Cameron seems to give credibility to conservative change. However, the effectiveness of the change is questionable. Using ethos and pathos, David Cameron is more than the new leader but a part of the new party brand. His speeches build-up a public profile, thereby placing himself at the heart of providing credibility to the movement for change.

The duality of political brand equity

PurposeThe democratic political product is complex and untangible. An underlying assumption of a democratic system is the involvement of voters, or consumers, but with contemporary political apathy this aspect is relatively unacknowledged. This paper aims to explore the role of the consumer in political branding.Design/methodology/approachTwo contrasting case studies compare the balance between the corporate brand of the political party and the brand image of two different kinds of local politician. Aaker's “Brand Equity Ten” is adapted to provide a suitable conceptual framework for the case study comparison.FindingsInvestigating the interaction between the community and politicians drew out important implications for the political brand. The paper concludes that managing the political brand entails a recognition of the inherent duality that resides in the political product. In an environment of reduced differentiation of political offerings to the electoral marketplace it is important for politicians and the political party to make early decisions about which aspect of this brand duality best serves individual careers and the party. Key to this decision is the opinion‐leading role of politically aware consumers.Research limitations/implicationsThis research shows that an individual politician's brand can compete with or enhance the corporate political party brand, which implies that political branding must take into account the communication role of the highly involved consumer.Originality/valueThis paper examines the under‐researched area of consumer contribution to political branding. The role of highly involved political consumers in constituency politics is clearly shown to affect the politician's brand equity. This leads to a re‐conceptualisation of the politician's brand vis‐à‐vis the political party brand.

Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

We investigate the connection between legislative parties and election outcomes, focusing on ideological party brand names that inform voters. If the source of information conveyed by brand names is the party's aggregate roll-call record, then changes in legislative party membership should influence election returns. We formalize the argument with an expected utility model of voting and derive district-level hypotheses, which we test on U.S. House elections from 1952 to 2000. We test alternative specifications that vary with respect to the specificity of voter information and find that party positions and heterogeneity both affect vote share independently of incumbents’ positions. The results provide modest support for the expected utility model but nevertheless suggest that Congress is an important source of the public's beliefs about the parties, and this effect is clearest for challengers, rather than incumbents, who run under the party's label.

From Patriotic Memories to ‘Patriotic History’ in Zimbabwe, 1990 – 2005

This article examines how military veterans and political veterans of Zimbabwe's nationalist movements competed for power and access to state resources, using their distinctive contributions to legitimate their claims and de-legitimate others' claims. Drawing on parliamentary debates over state assistance for war veterans and state pensions for heroes, the article seeks to highlight previously unexplored continuities between the political discourses within the ruling party in the 1990s and the ruling party's brand of nationalism after 2000. More generally, the essay suggests a much longer pattern of nationalists using struggle credentials to legitimate themselves and de-legitimate others in competition for power and resources.

Qualified exceptionalism: The US Congress in comparative perspective

The framers of the American Constitution devised a singular bicameral legislative body, which invested substantial power in both a broadly representative lower chamber and a second ‘deliberative’ chamber that was both insulated from the voters and unrepresentative of the population as a whole. Until the early twentieth century the singular US Congress changed little, but with growing national responsibilities it sought to develop organisational forms that could address a consistently stronger executive. Since the 1980s, the Congress has relied increasingly on stronger parties to organise its activities. This development, embraced in turn by Democrats and Republicans, has led to changes that have edged the Congress in the direction of parliamentary democracies. We conclude that this analysis has real but limited utility, as congressional party leaders continue to barter for votes and, in the context of narrow chamber majorities, often rely heavily on presidential assistance on divisive issues that are important to their party brand. Yet the traditional features of the American separated system – bicameralism, the committee systems, and the centrifugal forces emanating from diverse congressional districts, increasingly complex policy issues, and the fear of electoral retribution – also remain strong, and effectively constrain the influence of leaders. ‘Qualified exceptionalism’ thus most aptly describes the contemporary American Congress, which remains ‘exceptional’, but less than unique, as it responds to many of the same forces, in some of the same ways (for example, strong parties), as do many other representative assemblies around the world.

Ordered Communities

Ordered Communities

Election posters in Japan

This paper offers a preliminary look at an important medium of political communication in Japan, namely election posters fixed to official poster-boards. We analyze two sets of post-election surveys, present the legal provisions regulating posters and carry out a descriptive and comparative analysis of the posters themselves. We identify significant differences between parties in the content and design of their candidates' posters. However, posters for the LDP and DPJ in particular show little uniformity, suggesting a deliberate strategy of not actively promoting the party brand at election time. We also propose areas for future research.

The Recline of Party: Armchair Democracy and the Reform Party of Canada

If one were asked to go spelunking around the dim caverns of neology to come up with a satisfactory label for the type of political energy currently driving modern liberal democracies, one could do worse than to settle for centrifugalism. Instead of imploding due to the objective contradictions of their economic systems, these states have had to contend with an explosion of subjectivity--a fecund ecology of highly politicized identity-bearers has developed, and they appear bent on asserting their diversity in the face of outmoded centripetal institutions designed to falsely homogenize or assimilate their experiences, needs, and priorities. For the most part, the owners of these newly invigorated consciousnesses see the political infrastructure of liberal democracy as a barrier to their fulfillment that is every bit as formidable as the economic relations of liberal capitalism. This impression has manifested itself in escalating challenges to the legitimacy of traditional practices of representative democracy which, depending on the ideological concerns of the observer, are either decried as symptomatic of society's ungovernability, or celebrated as a blossoming of healthy pluralism. Canada has not been immune to these developments. The explicit recognition in the 1982 of Rights and Freedoms of aboriginal, multicultural, female, and disabled citizens helped to congeal these as distinct and legitimate political identities in Canada. (1) Additionally, recent years have witnessed the increasing activism of various religious, environmental, and gay rights groups who, together with the aforementioned Charter Canadians, have grown increasingly frustrated with the limitations of a political discourse constructed exclusively upon the brokerage of regional and linguistic interests. This debate crystallized around the popular rejection of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, and was evident in subsequent critical public commentary on the deficiencies of Canadian representative and parliamentary democracy. (2) It quickly became evident that the traditional party system was an insufficient collector or conduit for the burgeoning democratic aspirations of a heterogeneous citizenry not content to see their diverse brokered away to the margins of political consideration. This recent flurry of identity-based group politics, with its implicit rejection of traditional representative institutions, would appear to vindicate the observation made by John Meisel over a decade ago that an increase in the role of organized groups in the processes of interest articulation was leading to a decline in the aggregative capacity of traditional brokerage parties in Canada. (3) Indeed, the idea that organized interest groups are a democratic threat of one sort or another has since appeared as a common focus of two otherwise divergent offspring of the malaise afflicting the Canadian party system: the recent Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing (RCERPF) and the Reform Party of Canada. While the RCERPF's concern appears to be that democracy in Canada suffers as organized interest groups assume, but ultimately fail to fulfill, the role and functions of traditional political parties, Reform's approach to the problem of special interests is quite different. In this paper, I will use the example of its recent forays into the world of electronic plebiscitarianism to argue that the Reform party's brand of populism is designed specifically to combat the threat organized pose to the unfettered free market distribution of political and economic values, rather than as a democratic corrective to the rise of pluralism and the decline of parties. By contrasting it with the RCERPF in the context of the decline of party thesis, I intend to show that Reform's use of these techniques represents neither a serious desire to alleviate public alienation from the representative system, nor a sincere response to citizens demanding increased opportunities for meaningful democratic participation. …