Political Brands: Can Parties Be Distinguished by Their Online Brand Personality?

This paper investigates whether five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand positions of five English political parties are analyzed using Aaker's brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analyzed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties’ brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating competence and communicating sincerity and between communicating sophistication and communicating ruggedness. We find that parties’ brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green Party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker's existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing.     

Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes

I address the functioning of the U.S. governing system by analyzing distributional outcomes from 1947 to 2000. The key question is whether public policy influences distributional outcomes. The macropolitics model and power resource theory suggest that left policies should equalize the distribution of income. I utilize single equation error correction models to assess the impact of policy on income inequality through two mechanisms—market conditioning and redistribution. Since nearly every government action influences markets in some way, I examine policy in the aggregate rather than focusing only on policies explicitly designed to redistribute income. The analysis indicates that policy influences inequality through both mechanisms, with left policy producing more equality. The results are consistent with power resource theory and strongly support the macropolitics model. Furthermore, I find that market conditioning is as important as, and works in tandem with, explicit redistribution.