Party Image

THE IMAGE OF a political party consists of the impressions that people have of a party, along with the emotional affect (favorable or unfavorable feelings) about the party. In the simplest sense, party images are the adjectives that people think of when describing a political party, such as liberal/conservative, extreme/moderate, and disorganized/weak. Party images are important because they contribute to the selective convergence of the vote choices of large numbers of people who are making independent, discrete decisions based on their beliefs and interpretation of political information.

Political party images result from interactions among the images projected by the visible members of a political party, especially its elite officeholders; characterizations of the party in the media; and the biases of the people exposed to information about the political party. Because political parties are coalitional in nature, there are multiple messages and images conveyed to the public by party leaders and candidates. The image of a given party is also influenced by the countervailing messages of opposing party leaders and candidates. The media tend to reinforce and magnify party images by selecting stories and sources for interviews that fit popular stereotypes of the parties—often interviewing activists or party elites who hold relatively more ideologically extreme views compared to rank-and-file partisans or the public.

Individuals paying attention to and interpreting political information communicated during campaigns ultimately hold the images of the political parties. An individual's attention to and interpretation of political information is influenced by their unique set of beliefs, values, and attitudes formed through their socialization and life experiences. Since an individual's social group affiliations tend to affect the development of their politically relevant beliefs, values, and attitudes, so party images vary with the social group affiliations of individuals, including race, ethnicity, gender, class, and [Page 486]socioeconomic identification. People with greater interest in politics tend to have better developed cognitive schema (networks of associated ideas stored in long-term memory) for interpreting new political information, pay more attention to political information, retain more information, and thus tend to develop the most articulate party images. People with higher levels of education tend to form images of the political parties with broad, philosophical content (for example, incorporating liberal-conservative orientation). Newspaper readers are more likely than television viewers to have well-formed images of political parties.

Perhaps more important, voters with relatively well-developed cognitive schema interpret fragments of information in ways that are consistent with their existing beliefs. As a result, most voters' perceptions are affected by their party loyalties, ideological orientations, and deep-seated political attitudes relevant to the processing of newly-encountered information. For example, Republican and Democratic voters tend to pay attention to and incorporate information favorable to their party, while ignoring or distorting information that is unfavorable to their party.

Voters with relatively weak existing political predispositions (for example, nonpartisans and ideological moderates) tend to have less articulate images of the party, and are relatively more receptive to (and therefore more affected by) the messages and information communicated during a campaign. People lacking a clear image of the political parties often fail to exhibit consistent policy differences based on their party identification. Nonpartisan voters are more likely to form impressions that incorporate both favorable and unfavorable information about both political parties, resulting in greater ambivalence toward the parties.

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