The Elicitation Capabilities of Qualitative Projective Techniques in Political Brand Image Research

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Pich ◽  
Guja Armannsdottir ◽  
Dianne Dean

There is a paucity of research that outlines how to understand the image of political brands. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this research seeks to demonstrate the elicitation capabilities of qualitative projective techniques to explore the political brand image of the UK Conservative Party. This paper highlights that projective techniques can provide a greater understanding of underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates, and the positive and negative aspects of brand image. Many of the associations and perceptions may have been overlooked if other research methods had been adopted. Projective techniques may be adopted by political actors to assess how their brands are understood and, if required, make adaptations to their communicated brand identity.

UK Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-143
Author(s):  
Andrew Blick

This chapter switches the focus to political parties. It looks at their individual roles and how they operate. The chapter discusses the parties that constitute the ‘party system’. It considers the two main parties operating at the UK level: the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. It also looks at the smaller parties, such as the Liberal Democrats. The chapter considers the political approach of the various parties and the type of support they attract. It also looks at how parties are funded. The chapter provides a number of theoretical perspectives to help with an analysis of political parties. These are: the extent to which parties pursue values or power; the respective roles of their members and leaders; groupings within parties; how far the UK has a two-party system or whether our definition of the party system should be revised; and the relationships between the various parities. The chapter then gives examples of how these ideas play out with specific focus on recent events involving the Conversative and Labour parties. The chapter asks: do members have too much influence over their parties? The chapter ends by asking: where are we now?


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Pich ◽  
Guja Armannsdottir ◽  
Dianne Dean ◽  
Louise Spry ◽  
Varsha Jain

Purpose There are explicit calls for research devoted to how political actors present their brand to the electorate and how this is interpreted. Responding to this, the purpose of this paper is to build an understanding of how political brand messages and values are received and aligned with voter expectations, which in turn shapes the consistency of a political brand. Design/methodology/approach Using an interpretivist perspective, this two-stage approach first focuses on semi-structured interviews with internal stakeholders of the UK Conservative Party and second uses focus group discussions with external stakeholders (voters) of age 18-24 years. Data was collected between 1 December 2014 and 6 May 2015. Findings The findings suggest that the UK Conservative brand had recovered from the “nasty party” reputation. Further, the Conservative brand was perceived as credible, trustworthy and responsible, with positive associations of “economic competence”. However, while the nasty party imagery has declined, the UK Conservative brand continues to face challenges particularly in terms of longstanding negative associations perceived by both internal and external markets. Research limitations/implications It must be acknowledged that all research methods have their own limitations, and acknowledging these will strengthen the ability to draw conclusions. In this study, for example, due to time constraints during the election campaign period, 7 participants supported stage one of the study and 25 participants supported stage two of the study. However, participants from stage one of the study represented all three elements of the UK Conservative Party (Parliamentary, Professional and Voluntary). In addition, the elite interviews were longer in duration and this provided a greater opportunity to capture detailed stories of their life experiences and how this affected their brand relationship. Similarly, participants for stage two focussed on young voters of age 18-24 years, a segment actively targeted by the UK Conservative Party. Practical implications The brand alignment framework can help practitioners illuminate components of the political brand and how it is interpreted by the electorate. The increasing polarisation in politics has made this a vital area for study, as we see need to understand if, how or why citizens are persuaded by a more polarised brand message. There are also social media issues for the political brand which can distort the carefully constructed brand. There are opportunities to evaluate and operationalize this framework in other political contexts. Originality/value The brand alignment model extends current branding theory first by building on an understanding of the complexities of creating brand meaning, second, by operationalizing differences between the brand and how it is interpreted by the electorate, finally, by identifying if internal divisions within the political party pose a threat to the consistency of the brand.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 716-744
Author(s):  
Guja Armannsdottir ◽  
Christopher Pich ◽  
Louise Spry

Purpose The creation and development of candidate-politician brands, otherwise known as political co-brands, remains an under-researched area of study. This is supported by calls for more understanding on political co-brands and how they are positioned and managed by their creators. Framed by the concepts of internal brand identity and co-branding, this paper aims to investigate how political co-brand identity is constructed and managed over time, exploring alignment between the political co-brand and political corporate party brand. Design/methodology/approach An interpretivist revelatory multi-case study approach, using in-depth interviews, was conducted with three political co-brands (candidates-politicians) from the UK Conservative Party. The three cases represented constituencies across the UK from the North, Midlands and South of the country. The in-depth elite interviews were conducted July 2015 to September 2015. Methodological triangulation was also adopted to assess the coherency of emerging themes with online and offline materials and documents. A two-stage thematic analytical approach was used to interpret the findings. Findings This multiple case study demonstrates how successful political co-brands create and develop identities tailored to their constituency, often distinct from the corporate political brand and developed several years before electoral success at the ballot box. In addition, this study reveals that political co-brands are dichotomous in terms of strategically managing a degree of alignment with the corporate political brand yet maintaining a degree of independence. Research limitations/implications This study builds on limited existing concepts such as co-branding and political brand identity as a means of critical application. Existing research on co-branding remains a “relatively limited” and complex area of study and generally focuses on fictitious brands. Political brand identity remains an under-researched area. This in turn supports the development and advancement of political branding as an area of study. This paper highlights the opportunities of using the strategic approach of co-branding to help conceptualise “candidates-politicians” as political brands’ which up until now, “candidate-politician brands” have been difficult to define unlike the extensive research on corporate political brands. Practical implications This study has implications for practice too. Organisations and different typologies of political brands will be able to use this political co-brand identity framework as a diagnostic mechanism to investigate their co-brands current identity, assess alignment and make strategic changes or reposition the envisaged identity if desired. Similarly, organisations can use this framework, key dimensions and factors as a blueprint to design and build new political brands at a corporate and/or local level. Originality/value This study has implications for brands beyond the world of politics. Brands can adopt the political co-brand identity framework developed in this study as a pragmatic tool to investigate internally created co-brand identity and explore alignment with the corporate party brand identity. In addition, this research adds to the limited research on non-fictitious co-brands and co-branding literature at large and addresses the calls for more research on brand identity in new settings.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Pich ◽  
Dianne Dean

Purpose – This paper aimed to focus on political marketing and utilised a number of projective techniques to explore the UK Conservative Party’s “brand image” amongst young adults aged 18-24 years. There is little guidance in the extant literature regarding projective technique analysis. Furthermore, there are explicit calls for insight and more understanding into the analytical process. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this paper provides an illustrative guide that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques. Design/methodology/approach – This paper opted for an exploratory study using focus group discussions, combined with qualitative projective techniques. Eight two-hour focus group discussions were conducted with 46 young citizens aged 18-24 years from three locations in England. Focus groups were conducted prior to the 2010 UK General Election. The data from the projective techniques were thematically analysed by the researcher. Findings – This research provides insight into the broad process used to analyse and interpret the qualitative projective expressions in relation to the UK Conservative Party’s brand image from the perspective of young adults. Furthermore, this paper highlights that projective techniques can provide an insight into underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates and the positive and negative aspects of brand image. Research limitations/implications – Several limitations became apparent at the end of this study. As this is a qualitative study, findings cannot be generalisable to the wider population. Additionally, it is important to note that the researcher had limited experience of conducting focus group discussions combined with projective techniques, and this can be considered a limitation. Nevertheless, the researcher did attend professional “effective depth interviewing” training delivered by the “Marketing Research Society” before data collection. This goes some way in addressing this limitation. Practical implications – This paper provides an illustrative guide and insight into the analytical process that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques. This can be used by academics with little experience of projective techniques. Furthermore, this framework may be useful for practitioners such as marketers, political parties and candidates to explore and analyse the external image of other political brands. The elicitation ability of qualitative projective techniques facilitates greater expressive insight that may remain hidden if traditional direct data collection tools such as interviews and questionnaires are used. Social implications – This paper provides some understanding into how to analyse subjective meaning such as feelings, attitudes, perceptions and associations revealed through projective techniques. Furthermore, projective techniques can provide access to the private conscious and unconscious inner-world of the participant. They allow respondents to express themselves with greater detail and discussion compared with direct questioning. This research, therefore, presents greater insight in managing and analysing expressions generated from this non-intrusive approach that can encourage open disclosure with less hesitancy, verbally less demanding and suitable to overcome emotional, language and cultural barriers. Originality/value – This paper adds to the under-researched and undefined practice of analysing projective expressions by providing an illustrative process to interpret and understand insight generated from qualitative projective techniques. Thus, answers the explicit calls for detailed guidance in this area of research. This was achieved by critically reviewing and adapting the approaches taken by Boddy, 2005, Butler-Kisber, 2010 and Hofstede et al., 2007 and incorporating them into a pragmatic systematic framework. This research could be used as a foundation for future studies and a point of reference for people with limited knowledge of projective technique analysis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Iswandi Iswadi

  The ideology contestation is basically a classic polemic, where after independence the ideology of Islam was confronted with nationalism and took root until now (reform). However, the momentum of the 2019 election political contestation was again marked by the struggle of ideology namely ideology of Islamism and nationalism. The polemic began with the emergence of religious issues that were raised on the surface of political actors as a hegemony in taking the sympathy of voters. The existence of religion as a central issue began in 2016-2017 related to the prosecution of Ahok who insulted religious values ​​(Islam), and among the political parties involved in the demonstrations namely PPP, PKS, PBB, and PKB. In that momentum the beginning of the revival of Islamic ideology as the power in defending Islamic sovereignty. Judging from the ideology of political parties in Indonesia in the 2019 election political contestation, the ideology of political parties based on the statutes and bylaws (AD / ART) that the ideology applied can be classified into three parts namely ideology Nationalism, Islamism, and Nationalist-Religious, and the three ideologies. This can be proven based on the results of a survey from Australia 2017-2018 based on the voters. However, political parties based on multiple ideologies, PAN, PKB and Democrats, each have priority orientation. PAN and PKB tend to polarize the values ​​of Islamism (religious), while Democrats are more dominated by nationalist issues. The concept of Islamic political ideology, in the context of political contestation in political party elections, is basically a necessity to implement the values ​​of ri'ayah, taqwin, irshad and ta'dib through political education, or campaign in elections to achieve mutual benefit, both parties whose ideology Islamism, nationalism and nationalist-religious, so as to build the moralistic side of society, and intelligence in responding to the issues that exist in the election apart from that, political parties in confronting political contestation the emphasis of the movement must reflect the value of poverty, the three ideologies have been packaged in the values ​​of Pancasila in the third principles of Indonesian unity.         Asbtak Kontestasi ideology pada dasarnya polemik klasik, dimana pasca kemerdekaan ideologi islam dihadapkan dengan nasionalisme dan mengakar sampai sampai saat ini (reformasi). Akan tetapi momentum pemilu 2019 kontestasi politik kembali diwarnai pergulatan ideology yakni ideology islamisme dan nasionalisme. Polemik tersebut berawal dengan mencuatnya isu keagamaan yang dimunculkan dipermukaan pelaku politik sebagai hegemoni dalam mengambil simpati  pemilih. Eksistensi agama sebagai sentral isu berawal tahun 2016-2017 terkait penuntutan terhadap ahok yang melecehkan nilai-nilai agama (islam), dan diantara partai politik yang terlibat dalam demonstrasi yakni PPP, PKS, PBB, dan PKB. Dalam momentum tersebut awal mencuatnya kembali ideologi islam sebagai of the power dalam mempertahan kedaulatan Islam. Menilik ideologis partai politik di Indonesia pada konstestasi politik pemilu 2019, ideology partai politik berdasarkan anggaran dasar dan anggaran rumah tangga (AD/ART) bahwa ideologi yang diterapkan dapat diklasifikasikan menjadi tiga bagian yakni ideology Nasionalisme, Islamisme, dan Nasionalis-Religius, dan ketiga ideology tersebut dapat dibuktikan dengan berdasarkan hasil survey dari asutralia 2017-2018 berdasarkan pemilih. Namun demikian partai poltik yang berasaskan ideologi ganda, PAN, PKB dan Demokrat, masing-masing memiliki kiblat prioritas. PAN dan PKB condong polarisasi nilai-nilai islamisme (religious), sedangkan Demokrat lebih didominasi oleh isu-isu nasionalis. Konsep ideology politik islam, dalam konsteks kontestasi politik dalam pemilu partai politik pada dasarnya sebuah keharusan mengimplementasikan nilai-nilai ri’ayah, taqwin, irsyad dan ta’dib melalui pendidikan politik, ataupun kampanye dalam pemilu guna mencapai kemaslahatan bersama, baik partai yang berideologi islamisme, nasionalisme dan nasionalis-religius, sehingga terbangun sisi moralistik masyarakat, dan kecerdasan dalam menanggapi isu-isu yang ada dalam pemilu. selain dari itu partai politik dalam menghadapi konstestasi politik penekanan gerakannya harus mencermikan nilai kemaslahan, ketiga ideology tersebut telah kemas dalam nilai-nilai pancasila pada sila ketiga persatuan Indonesia. 


Author(s):  
Angela Alonso

The Second Reign (1840–1889), the monarchic times under the rule of D. Pedro II, had two political parties. The Conservative Party was the cornerstone of the regime, defending political and social institutions, including slavery. The Liberal Party, the weaker player, adopted a reformist agenda, placing slavery in debate in 1864. Although the Liberal Party had the majority in the House, the Conservative Party achieved the government, in 1868, and dropped the slavery discussion apart from the parliamentary agenda. The Liberals protested in the public space against the coup d’état, and one of its factions joined political outsiders, which gave birth to a Republic Party in 1870. In 1871, the Conservative Party also split, when its moderate faction passed a Free Womb bill. In the 1880s, the Liberal and Conservative Parties attacked each other and fought their inner battles, mostly around the abolition of slavery. Meanwhile, the Republican Party grew, gathering the new generation of modernizing social groups without voices in the political institutions. This politically marginalized young men joined the public debate in the 1870s organizing a reformist movement. They fought the core of Empire tradition (a set of legitimizing ideas and political institutions) by appropriating two main foreign intellectual schemes. One was the French “scientific politics,” which helped them to built a diagnosis of Brazil as a “backward country in the March of Civilization,” a sentence repeated in many books and articles. The other was the Portuguese thesis of colonial decadence that helped the reformist movement to announce a coming crisis of the Brazilian colonial legacy—slavery, monarchy, latifundia. Reformism contested the status quo institutions, values, and practices, while conceiving a civilized future for the nation as based on secularization, free labor, and inclusive political institutions. However, it avoided theories of revolution. It was a modernizing, albeit not a democrat, movement. Reformism was an umbrella movement, under which two other movements, the Abolitionist and the Republican ones, lived mostly together. The unity split just after the shared issue of the abolition of slavery became law in 1888, following two decades of public mobilization. Then, most of the reformists joined the Republican Party. In 1888 and 1889, street mobilization was intense and the political system failed to respond. Monarchy neither solved the political representation claims, nor attended to the claims for modernization. Unsatisfied with abolition format, most of the abolitionists (the law excluded rights for former slaves) and pro-slavery politicians (there was no compensation) joined the Republican Party. Even politicians loyal to the monarchy divided around the dynastic succession. Hence, the civil–military coup that put an end to the Empire on November 15, 1889, did not come as a surprise. The Republican Party and most of the reformist movement members joined the army, and many of the Empire politician leaders endorsed the Republic without resistance. A new political–intellectual alignment then emerged. While the republicans preserved the frame “Empire = decadence/Republic = progress,” monarchists inverted it, presenting the Empire as an era of civilization and the Republic as the rule of barbarians. Monarchists lost the political battle; nevertheless, they won the symbolic war, their narrative dominated the historiography for decades, and it is still the most common view shared among Brazilians.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1222-1236
Author(s):  
Flaminia Saccà

In the last decade, Italy has gone through some deep changes in the political sphere. The fall of the Berlin Wall had forced political parties from opposite sides to re-organize themselves: their targets, ideologies and projects. At the same time, these historical events have been shortly followed by a major national bribe scandal that invested the main political leaders who had governed the Country for half a century. As a result, the last turn of the past Millennium has left a strongly politicized Country with no acknowledged leaders, no clear ideologies, no traditional, recognizable parties. It is in those years that Berlusconi's new venture gained votes and success. The fracture between political organizations, leaders and citizens though, became unhealable. The younger generations seemed to be the ones who suffered the most from political apathy or, worse, distrust. So we wanted to investigate who were the young politicians who, in these times of crises, had chosen politics as an important part of their lives. We have carried out two different surveys in different years and we found that political parties were changing deeply and radically. That their role in the political socialization of young political actors had become very thin. That candidates began to be chosen amongst the affluent few or, at least, amongst those whose personal fame and social/professional/family network would guarantee their party at least a dowry of votes that could make the difference in times of elections. But this method would not guarantee cohesion nor government stability.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Fabio Wolkenstein

In addition to summarizing the book’s main themes as described, this Introduction places special emphasis on connecting the problem animating the book—the apparent incapacity of contemporary parties to mediate between citizens and the state—to current political developments in established Western democracies, showing that the issues the book addresses are not only of academic interest but also directly relevant to ongoing public debates about the state and health of representative democracy. Chief amongst the themes foregrounded here is the rise of so-called ‘populist’ parties on the left and right of the political spectrum, as well as the re-branding of established political actors as ‘movements’ (think, e.g. of Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche). These phenomena are interpreted as part of a larger ‘revolt against intermediary bodies’—meaning first and foremost a rebellion against political parties. The Introduction suggests that this ‘revolt’ brings with it only a temporary shift in how representative politics looks, without actually reversing the disconnect between parties and voters or compelling established political parties to give up their privileges and de-colonize the institutions of the state. This argument sets the stage for the book’s core contention that more thought has to be put into finding ways to reconnect political parties with society.


Author(s):  
Margaret Arnott ◽  
Richard Kelly

This chapter discusses the role of smaller parties in the law-making process. General elections in the UK are conducted with an electoral system which militates against the representation of smaller political parties, particularly those having no strong support at the regional level. However, events at Westminster over the last decade have increased the prominence of smaller parties in the operation of parliamentary business. The chapter first considers the role of small parties in the UK Parliament, committees and legislation, as well as their participation in backbench debates before examining how the political and electoral context of Parliament, especially in the twenty-first century, has affected the representation of smaller parties and the ways in which reforms to parliamentary procedure since the 1980s have enhanced the role of the second opposition party. It suggests that Parliament today offers more opportunities for smaller political parties to influence debate and policy, but this remains quite limited.


Author(s):  
Philip Norton

This chapter discusses the political organization of the UK Parliament, at the heart of which are the political parties. It first considers the internal organization of Parliament, focusing on how political parties are structured. There are two principal parties facing one another in Parliament: the party in government and opposition parties. The opposition comprises frontbench Members (shadow ministers) and backbenchers. Smaller parties may also designate some Members as ‘frontbenchers’ (official spokespeople for the party). The frontbench of each party includes whips. The chapter provides an overview of these whips as well as parliamentary parties before considering legislative–executive relations. In particular, it examines how parties shape the relationship between Parliament and the executive, and how these have changed over time.


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