Just Call Me Movement: Party (Re-)branding in Europe

Party systems across Europe are under pressure to adapt to shifting societal cleavages, the rise of anti-establishment sentiment, and increasingly popular challengers in electoral and protest politics. While the scholarly literature emphasizes the programmatic dimension of party system change, changes in parties’ organizational features and brands are less often studies. We ask, to what extent and under what conditions do political parties move away from party-brands, take on ‘movement labels’, and does that correspond to more networked organizational features? We map out the big picture of the development of party labels across Europe since 1945. To do so, we rely on original data on the names of political parties and the extent to which they have moved from referring to themselves as ‘parties’ towards adapting alternative labels, such as “movement,” “league,” or “force.” In a second step, we consider secondary data sources to link party labels with organizational features. We study the emergence of non-party labels as both a branding decision by new parties and an attempt at re-branding made by existing formations. Our preliminary results show that non-party labels are a feature of individual formations and a system-level characteristic. As we argue, in systems where a selected set of parties abandon party labels, non-party brands carry a signaling value. We show an increasing trend to take on non-party labels in both older and in newer party systems in Western and Eastern Europe. These results highlight the conditions under which party labels act as a signaling device of organizational features.