Thank you! :)

On a personal note, this has been the paper I have worked on the most of everything I have published. I have learned a lot along the way as the paper matured. We are grateful to everyone who commented on various iterations.

We are currently writing a book on these topics, so stay tuned for more 😊

The paradox: name changes don’t buy much. In the experiments, party-name labels have tiny effects (a “movement” label is only ~+1pp vs no label). Voters react more to signals about how parties organize (e.g., ties to civil society) and they tend to punish established parties that rebrand.

Who drives this change? Mostly newer parties, parties on the right, and often parties in opposition, with the radical right especially prone to adopting “movement”-like branding. The shift is also stronger where party systems are more unstable (higher electoral volatility).

Big supply-side takeaway: since the 1960s, parties increasingly drop “party” and classic ideology words. By the early 2020s, nearly 2/3 of parties no longer identify as “parties” in their official name; “movement” references rise in waves (e.g., post-2008).

Demand side: we ran two conjoint survey experiments (2023) in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Hungary, one on branding of a new party, one on rebranding an existing party, to see whether “nonclassical” labels actually help.

Supply side: we built a ballot-paper party-name dataset by manually coding name changes across 616 parties, 28 European countries, between 1945-2023 (or from the first competitive election). This lets us track how party labels evolve across decades and party systems.