Voters' Perceptions of Party Brands (Elements in Comparative Political Behavior)

By: David Fortunato and Thiago N. Silva and Laron K. Williams

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Synopsis: In order to cast a satisfying vote, understand politics, or otherwise participate in political discourse or processes, voters must have some idea of what policies parties are pursuing and, more generally, 'who goes with whom.' This Element aims to both advance the study of how voters formulate and update their perceptions of party brands and persuade our colleagues to join us in studying these processes. To make this endeavor more enticing, but no less rigorous, the authors make three contributions to this emerging field of study: presenting a framework for building and interrogating theoretical arguments, aggregating a large, comprehensive data archive, and recommending a parsimonious strategy for statistical analysis. In the process, they provide a definition for voters' perceptions of party brands and an analytical schema to study them, attempt to contextualize and rationalize some competing findings in the existing literature, and derive and test several new hypotheses.