The Colors of the Populist Radical Right: The Strategic Use of Hue and Saturation in Party Logos

Abstract

Populist radical right (PRR) parties tend to stress their differences from other parties. Yet at the same time, PRR parties have increasingly sought to integrate into party systems across the globe. In seeking to understand the way that PRR parties negotiate this paradoxical situation, the literature tends to focus on their policy offerings or discourse. We, on the contrary, investigate an underestimated aspect of their political communication: their visuals. Namely, we focus on the question of if and how PRR parties communicate their similarities or differences from other parties via the color profiles of their logos, given that color is a key way that political parties can signal (a) their ideological commitments (via hue) and (b) their approach to “valence” considerations (via saturation). We expect PRR parties’ attempts to signal their integration into party systems to be mainly sought via saturation, as a proxy for valence perceptions related to parties’ seriousness and competence, while we expect them to signal their difference from other parties via hue, given the incentive for PRR parties to communicate their ideological distance from non-populist parties as a marker of distinctiveness in the political market. We test our research questions by analyzing parties’ logos across 35 democracies in recent elections. Results largely confirm our expectations, demonstrating the utility of focusing on the visual aspects of PRR parties’ political communication. Interestingly, the results do not replicate if we focus on populist parties beyond the PRR party family.