Party Reputation Research Articles

The times they are a‐changin': An experimental assessment of the causes and consequences of sudden policy U‐turns

AbstractPast research has long documented that voters dislike parties and leaders who reverse their policy positions. But would they tolerate (principled) policy U‐turns if they are motivated by external events, such as a large‐scale crisis or scientific evidence? In this study, we explore whether the motivation behind positional shifts affects voter evaluations of political parties. To do so, we seek to connect the causes and consequences of policy shifts, a synergy still unexplored in the literature. We suggest that, while U‐turns, in general, can be damaging to a party's reputation, principled changes brought about by new scientific evidence or major crises should not necessarily have negative implications, because these changes can be necessary for the public good. We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment in Germany (n = 3127) featuring two classes of policy reversals: strategic and principled. Surprisingly, however, we find that voters by and large hold negative views of different types of policy U‐turns, thus including when external circumstances suggest change may be necessary. Interestingly, our empirical analysis reveals intriguing patterns. First, voters are willing to tolerate all sorts of policy reversals if the party ends up adopting their positions, suggesting that proximity matters even in the event of exogenous events. Second, voters with high levels of political trust tolerate different types of policy reversals, even when the party changes for mere strategic office‐seeking motivations. Coming from the premise that political and societal change is imperative, these findings have direct implications for democracies.

Party Reputation, Moral Expectations and Voting Behaviour in South Korea

Do voters punish political parties for unsatisfactory performance on issues and traits the parties are expected to excel at? Issue and trait ownership theories stipulate that parties establish reputations regarding policy issues and attributes; voters then reward or punish the party depending on how much voter expectations were met. However, reactions to politicians’ performances may vary depending on voters’ moral intuitions and party affiliations. Analyzing survey and news data on the 2021 mayoral byelection in Seoul, South Korea, we find that party reputation and the expectation gap affected votes. Also, as moral foundations theory (MFT) suggests, differing moral priorities of liberal and conservative voters explain variation in responses to ethical violations. Our findings suggest the applicability of the party ownership framework and MFT in a newer, non-Western democracy. This study contributes to our understanding of voting behaviour in South Korea, with an emphasis on reputation, expectation gaps and moral intuitions.

The Geographic Scope Of Opposition Challenges In Malaysia's Parliament

During the long rule of the BN (Barisan Nasional) coalition prior to 2018, Malaysia's parliament, the Dewan Rakyat, was largely absent from analyses of political contestation between the ruling government and its opposition. Nevertheless, during this period, opposition MPs were active users of available legislative tools such as parliamentary questions, offering a rich source of data about their priorities and political positioning. This article investigates how MPs from the opposition used parliamentary questions to build their public reputations, and whether those reputations were built around attention to local, subnational, or national issues. It uses an original dataset of over 37,000 oral questions submitted by MPs in Malaysia's House of Representatives from 2008 to 2018. I find that opposition MPs were more likely to focus on local and subnational reputation-building compared to ruling government MPs. These differences were especially pronounced in East Malaysia, where opposition MPs were heavily oriented towards local infrastructure and issues of state underdevelopment and autonomy. I explain these findings as a result of the opposition's need to build a constituency reputation in lieu of access to state resources, as well as a greater responsiveness to local- and region-specific grievances. This focus both complements, and differs from, how Malaysia's MPs used extra- parliamentary strategies to cultivate personal and party reputation.

Conceptual Problems of Political Parties Cadre Management in the Reform Era in Indonesia

This study describes the dynamics and practices of political party management in Indonesia after entering the reform era. The hopes for the welfare of the Indonesian people towards the existence of political parties in Indonesia have not shown significant results. Political parties are still trapped by internal interests compared to the big goal of improving the welfare of society, even the party's reputation in politics tends to decrease in society because of practices that violate the norms of decency. This study uses a qualitative method with a descriptive analysis approach From the existing data, factual problems of political parties were found. The political party cadre system is unable to build cadre capacity, there is no capacity standardization in cadre recruitment, cadre capacity shifts to financial capacity, personal motivation is still unstable and always changes when cadres have occupied legislative positions and regional heads. The organizational climate of political parties is periodic, only before elections, there is no integrated teamwork in political parties, political work in political parties still depends on the interests of cadres. The leadership role in the lower regions is not able to translate the vision, mission and policy directives of the top level leaders, the top level leadership is unable to absorb aspirations and communication from the lower level leadership. This research has a novelty that the management of political parties really needs the implementation of human capital. The human capital approach is currently still being applied to profit institutions and has never been tested in non-profit institutions, namely political party organizations. Keywords: political parties, cadre governance, reformation era, human capital, leadership

Comparing the impact of Joe Biden and Donald Trump on popular attitudes toward their parties

AbstractThis article extends the analysis of how presidents influence popular beliefs and feelings about their parties to include Donald Trump's full term and the first 2 years of Joe Biden's presidency. The results from examination of hundreds of surveys confirm that both presidents, like their predecessors, have strongly influenced evaluations of their parties generally and of their congressional wings specifically. They have also had a powerful impact on assessments of their party's competence in dealing with the COVID‐19 pandemic and on voters' preferences in their midterm election. For the most part, Trump's impact has been notably greater than Biden's, whose influence generally matches that of earlier presidents. Trump also stands out as having a larger and more consistent impact on opinions of the opposition, and he is exceptional in continuing to influence his party's reputation and standing after leaving office.

Analysis of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) through the lens of four distinct profiles: radical, niche, anti-establishment, and party reputation, 2013–2017

After the 2017 election, the radical right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became the Bundestag’s third-largest party. While the rise of the AfD drew scholarly interest, most publications analyzing its evolution were published during a period when the party was undergoing transition, the euro-crisis had decreased in prominence, and the party was going through an inner conflict between liberals and radicals. This article seeks to provide a systematic examination of how these developments have impacted the party from 2013 to 2017 and endeavors to answer the question of whether the AfD has become more mainstream by utilizing the framework devised by Akkerman et al. (2016) to assess party transformation along four key dimensions: 1) shifts in radical positions on key issues; 2) shifts from a niche to a socioeconomic-focused party; 3) shifts in the anti-establishment profile; and 4) shifts in party reputation. Through an analysis of internally and externally oriented material such as electoral manifestos, party documentation, published interviews with AfD leaders, and press releases, the article shows that the AfD has not shifted toward the mainstream. Instead, the party became more radical on the first three dimensions while demonstrating signs of mainstreaming on the fourth dimension in order to avoid legal action.

Capturing vote-seeking incentives and the cultivation of a personal and party vote

Electoral rules establish incentives that encourage candidates to strike a particular balance between cultivating their own personal reputations and cultivating shared party reputations. Higher levels of intraparty competition stress the need for an individual reputation and minimize the usefulness of a shared, party reputation. We develop a new indicator of intraparty competition that addresses shortcomings pointed out in previously used indicators. We also identify new, particularly intuitive indicators of ”personal” and ”party” vote seeking. Using within-system and across-system variation in parliamentary elections in Japan, we find that candidate manifestos contain more frequent uses of first-person pronouns and candidate names and fewer references to political parties when intraparty competition is stiffest.

The Analyses of the Idelogy and History of National Outlook Movement in Turkey

This article examines and analyzes the history of the formation and development of the National Outlook Movement in Turkey, its ideology and social base and the main driving forces, as well as the main political parties and their activities. The article also analyzes the historical circumstances that influenced the formation and development of the movement, including the role of the movement's leader, prominent scientist and researcher, professor Najmeddin Erbakan, as well as the reasons for his entry into the political arena and its consequences. The role of N. Erbakan in the political life of Turkey was investigated and tried to be evaluated. It was noted that, the main ideology of the National Outlook parties is a free market economy without interest, the strengthening of production, the establishment of a just society in which basic human rights are protected, and so on.The first openly political Islamist political party in Turkish history was the National Order Party, formed on January 30, 1970. However, the party did not last long and was closed in 1971 by a decision of the Constitutional Court. Instead, party representatives formed the National Salvation Party in October 1972. This party, like all other political parties in Turkey, was closed after the 1980 coup. However, it became a partner of the government for the first time, and one of the most important decisions of this government was send of Turkish forces to Cyprus.With the permission of the National Security Council, the Welfare Party (WP) was formed in 1983 under the leadership of Ahmet Tekdal, representing the same direction. After the lifting of political bans, N. Erbakan was re-elected party leader. The 1990s marked a new stage in the development of the National Outlook movement. The Welfare Party's reputation began to rise. In the 1995 elections, the party won 21 percent of the vote. In 1996, N. Erbakan formed a coalition government with the True Path Party, led by Tansu Chiller. This government resigned as a result of the February 28 process, and the party was dissolved. The members of the party formed the Virtue Party. Disagreements between innovative and conservative groups within the party led to the formation of two political parties, the Justice and Development Party and the Felicity Party, after the party was dissolved in 2001.

How media diet, partisan frames, candidate traits, and political organization-public relationship communication drive party reputation

This study examined the ability of antecedents such as media diet and candidate traits to impact political organization-public relationships (POPRs), in turn affecting views on party reputation. As expected, survey respondents reported greater levels of relationship-focused communication and higher reputation assessments of their own parties, additionally rating their party’s candidate higher in authenticity and character. Connecting media diet and reputation, heavier use of partisan, traditional media (e.g., talk radio and cable news) indicated increased partisan divides, suggesting young and often inexperienced voters engage in motivated reasoning, seeking out information from sources that cater to their existing ideologies. This pattern was less pronounced for infotainment and social media sources, suggesting promising agenda-building opportunities for political PR practitioners. SEM analyses demonstrated the significant influence of candidate traits and POPR on party reputation, though manifestations of effects differed among Democrats and Republicans, the implications of which are discussed.

Corruption, Party Leaders, and Candidate Selection: Evidence from Italy

Research indicates that voters are not particularly effective at removing corrupt politicians from office, in part because voters make decisions on the basis of many competing factors. Party leaders are much more single‐minded than voters and will choose to deselect implicated legislators if it means maintaining a positive party reputation and improving the odds of winning a legislative majority. We examine renominations to Italy’s legislature in two periods marked by corruption. We compare these renomination patterns with those from the prior legislature, when corruption lacked political salience. Our analysis shows that incumbent renominations are negatively associated with the number of press mentions that link the incumbent to corruption—but only when corruption is salient to the public. Our study highlights the importance of party leaders in forcing malfeasant legislators out of office—and reducing corruption—and redirects attention from voters to political elites as a critical channel in enforcing democratic accountability.

Tribalism can corrupt: Why people denounce or protect immoral group members

When ingroup members behave immorally, what determines whether other group members denounce vs. protect them? We asked if concerns for group reputation might determine how people respond to the moral indiscretions of group members. In four studies, participants read about an immoral act committed by a member of their political party. The act was either publicly known to people outside of the participant's political party (i.e., “public transgression”) or hidden from public view (i.e., “private transgression”). In the public transgression condition, participants endorsed having their political party openly denounce the transgressor in an apparent effort to prevent the party's reputation from being tarnished by association. In the private transgression condition, however, they were reluctant to publicly report the transgressive party member, presumably to prevent reputational loss. Feelings of responsibility for the group arising from either identity fusion with the party or being experimentally assigned to occupy a position of responsibility for the party amplified these effects. Strongly fused participants were even willing to contemplate extreme, unethical actions aimed at protecting party reputation (e.g. tampering with incriminating evidence), regardless of the publicness of the transgression. We conclude that feelings of responsibility for the group and reputational considerations determine whether people denounce or protect ingroup transgressors.

Campus Sex in Context: Organizational Cultures and Women's Engagement in Sexual Relationships on Two American College Campuses

An “inhabited” approach to the study of institutions examines how organizational actors produce locally distinctive meaning in response to similar institutional forces. Adopting inhabited institutionalism to the study of campus sexual life, this study draws on interviews with 54 undergraduate women at two four‐year universities in the United States—Ivy U and State U—to show campus cultures unique to a university inform women's decisions to engage in hookups and/or relationships. For women attending Ivy U, an elite institution where pressure to succeed is palpable, both hookups and long‐distance relationships alike are posited as advantageous for the time‐crunched, preprofessional student. At State U, a public school with a party reputation, women explain their engagement in hookups as part of the “fun” of college life, while women seeking or involved in committed relationships are obligated to negotiate the effects of the party culture in their partnerships. This study challenges the notion of a monolithic sexual culture across university settings by showing how campus cultures cultivated at the local level create unique organizational conditions within which undergraduate women forge and explain their engagement in hookups and relationships alike.

Party Leader or Party Reputation Concerns? How Vertical Partisan Alignment Reins in Subnational Fiscal Profligacy

Some scholars argue that party leader considerations drive governors copartisan with presidents toward fiscal discipline, while others argue that party reputation concerns guide their behavior. To ...

When Reputation Trumps Policy: Party Productivity Brand and the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act

Abstract In late 2017, congressional Republicans enacted a major tax bill despite voter opposition, resistance from organized interests, and considerable uncertainty about its policy consequences. Why did they do so? We argue that Republicans’ concern with their party’s reputation–in particular, its productivity brand–trumped negative evaluations of the legislation by citizens, interest groups, and policy experts. To support this claim, we analyze measures of legislative output, news media content, public opinion, and lawmaker sentiment. Our findings underscore the importance of party reputation in explaining legislative behavior and suggest that there may be explanatory value in distinguishing between different types of party valence brands.

Institutional Mismatch, Party Reputation, and Industry Interests: Understanding the Politics of Private-Heavy Pension Systems

Private-heavy welfare systems, in which low or moderate state benefits are topped up by private welfare arrangements, are expected to undermine political support for the extension of social rights and perpetuate benefit fragmentation over time. And where low state benefits are means tested, political support is expected to be particularly prone to erosion. In this article I develop the argument that the combination of private pensions and means-testing does not always perpetuate fragmentation. Rather, it structures the policy preferences of pension industry representatives and right-of-centre parties such that these actors push for reforms to make the state pension more universal. I make my argument by examining the reform history of nine private-heavy pension systems in the three decades since 1980. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis maps the conditions under which universalizing reforms have occurred, and two case studies link institutional conditions to reform outcomes via the policy preferences of key political actors.

Disputed Ownership: Parties, Issues, and Traits in the Minds of Voters

Is party “ownership” of issues and traits manifest in the minds of voters in ways that could generate the oft-hypothesized implications for mass and elite electoral behavior? We specify two ways in which it may be: party reputations refer to the association of a trait or issue with a party; candidate stereotyping requires that party labels prompt differential assignment of attributes or competencies to candidates. We develop a quantitative measure of both ownership types, and apply it to issues and traits. New national survey data provide the first evidence that party reputation ownership exists for issues and traits. New experimental tests reveal evidence of candidate stereotyping for issues, but not traits. Voters associate some traits more with one party, but may not assign them to candidates based upon party label, demonstrating a key difference in the nature and likely implications of issue and trait ownership.

The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party

This article draws from the fields of political science and of organisational studies to explore the short-term and long-term impact of New Labour’s party management on the quality of party processes as well as on party reputation. It is based on the long-term ethnographic participant observation of the Labour Party at local and regional levels, as well as national events such as annual conferences. The article starts by identifying the distinctive features of New Labour’s party management. It then examines the “unintended consequences” of this brand of party management, showing this model to be mainly self-defeating. The final section provides a general assessment of the impact of New Labour’s party management from the perspective of organisational learning and innovation. Overall the article stresses the long-term poisonous effects of this brand of leadership and management on political organisations and on politics in general.

The Coevolution of Affect toward Presidents and Their Parties

This article reports the results of new research undertaken as part of a broader project examining how postwar U.S. presidents have influenced their party's popular standing, reputation, electoral fortunes, and attractiveness as an object of identification over both the short and long runs. The research published so far has found the president's influence to be strong and pervasive. Popular ratings of the president's party generally, and of its congressional wing and its leaders specifically, vary directly with presidential job approval and favorability ratings. Perceptions of the president's ideology shape perceptions of his party's ideology. Opinions of the president's performance have strongly influenced judgments of relative party competence in dealing with the nation's most important problem in every administration since Harry Truman's. The president's perceived success in handling specific policy domains also shapes his party's reputation for managing them. Performance evaluations of presidents affect their parties' electoral prospects as measured between elections by the generic House vote intention question as well as their actual fortunes on election day, both directly and through their impact on party identification (or party ID), which moves systematically in response to changes in evaluations of the president's performance at both the individual and aggregate levels (Jacobson 2009a, 2012, 2013, 2015). These findings leave no doubt that postwar presidencies have had both specific and diffuse effects on how Americans come to perceive, evaluate, feel about, and identify with the national parties. Presidents do not assume office with a blank partisan canvas, of course. Existing partisan biases and party images shape reactions to future presidents as soon as they arrive on the national stage and continue to exert a powerful influence on evaluations of their performance throughout their time in office (Jacobson 2011, 5-6). In previous analyses, I treated the initial reactions to each administration as a starting point, the product of existing configurations of public attitudes toward and beliefs about parties that were subsequently updated and revised in response to developments during a president's years of service. For the research reported here, I move backward from this starting point to examine the ways in which attitudes toward presidents and their parties come to be linked in the public mind. I also move forward beyond the president's years in office to gauge how this linkage decays when presidents are no longer on the ballot and new candidates emerge to take up their party's banner. Constrained by the available data, my focus here is on the affective component of political evaluations: how partisanship influences affect toward presidential candidates and presidents, and how affect toward these party figures in turn influences feelings about their parties, over the course of political careers. To anticipate, I find clear and consistent evidence that links between party and candidate affect are comparatively modest at first, increase sharply during the initial campaign for the White House for both candidates, tighten further when the winner seeks reelection, and then atrophy once the president leaves office. In this sequence, the causal arrow runs first from party affect (manifest in party identification) to candidate affect but gradually shifts direction to run from candidate or president affect to party affect (and party identification). I also find that the relative impact on party affect of the president and prospective or actual successors within the same party varies over time in a way that underlines the president's leading role in shaping feelings about his party. Theoretical Considerations These patterns, detailed and documented in the sections to follow, are fully consistent with constructivist models of the survey response. According to Zaller and Feldman's version, most citizens do not hold preformed attitudes that they express when questioned in a survey; rather they carry around in their heads a mix of only partially consistent ideas and considerations. …

‘Wilful Blindness’: Effects and Perceptions of New Labour’s Party Management

This article shows how Lewis Minkin’s specific approach meticulously unpicks the mechanisms of party management to reveal the vulnerabilities of New Labour’s managerial culture and behaviour. Minkin breaks new ground in our understanding of organisational change and offers a better grasp of the dialectic between organisational culture and party reputation. The first section of the article presents the main counterproductive effects of the New Labour managers’ ‘rolling coup’ on the project it was supposed to sustain, with detrimental effects on intra-party democracy and organisational vitality. The second section highlights some of the main external misconceptions about the party and about the impact of the reforms by analysing the effect of party management on perceptions of New Labour and of Tony Blair, both in the United Kingdom and abroad (in France in particular), exploring the paradox of Blair’s standing abroad as a model to emulate, despite being described at home as ‘the most reviled former prime minister since 1945’. The conclusion draws out lessons from Blair’s management style – and eventual downfall – for star-struck foreign politicians and commentators.

How Presidents Shape Their Party's Reputation and Prospects: New Evidence

Previous work has demonstrated presidents have a powerful influence on their party's popularity, reputation for competence, perceived ideological leanings, and attractiveness as an object of personal identification. This article extends the analysis by examining (1) how presidents shape popular opinions of congressional parties and leaders, (2) how evaluations of the president's handling of specific policy areas affect his party's reputation for effectiveness in handing these domains, (3) how presidents affect perceptions of their party's sympathy for ordinary people, (4) how presidents influence generic preferences for House candidates and party control of Congress as measured in surveys between elections, and (5) how presidents affect the partisan leanings of the generation that comes of political age during their administrations. The evidence confirms that popular reactions to presidents have both immediate and longer‐term consequences for how his party and, to a lesser extent, the rival party are regarded by the American people.