On the Reputation of Political Parties: Emotional Appeal and Competence in a Cross-National Study

By Chris Levy

Second of two parts

Recently, TNS collected crossnational data on the reputation of political parties in the eyes of the general public, using a method originally developed as a management tool for measuring the reputations of corporations in the private sector. By analyzing these data, we can examine possible influences on the reputation of parties, which may explain the pattern of results uncovered. Does the reputation of parties depend on the performance of the governments that are the product of their competition? Or is it more deeply rooted, depending, for example, on citizens’ wider belief in the values of the democratic system to which parties belong?

In part 1 of “On the Reputation of Political Parties,” we established three hypotheses to explain the nature and dynamics of political party reputation:

• Hypothesis 1: Political parties will have a lower reputation in countries where populations hold values that are more post-materialist in orientation. 
• Hypothesis 2: There will be a higher reputation for parties in countries where governments are seen to be performing well.
• Hypothesis 3: The reputation of parties will be highest in countries where there is a strong preference among the citizens for democracy as a system of government.

Combinations of these three hypotheses allow for a range of scenarios explaining party reputation. As Figure 1 illustrates, reputation may be influenced from within the political system, either from below by governmental performance (hypothesis 2, at the left of the figure), or from above by preference for democracy (hypothesis 3, in the middle). Hypotheses 2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive, which means a third possibility—on the right—is that party reputation is influenced from both directions within the system.

We have also hypothesised that party reputation is subject to outside factors—specifically, the cultural changes that have occurred in the different countries as a result of postwar economic growth (hypothesis 1). The three scenarios shown in Figure 1 therefore also have variants, with additional influence coming from this post-materialist culture shift. Yet another possibility is that party reputation may derive from this source, but none of the factors influencing it come from within the political system.

To test these various scenarios, we first identified data sources which best described the variables we wished to include in the analysis—that is, we looked for indicators of respondents’ post-materialist values, satisfaction with government performance, and preference for democracy. We then used a statistical procedure called a linear regression to examine the relationships between these variables on the one hand and the TRI*M index—our measure of party reputation in the various countries—on the other.

Data to test hypotheses 1 and 3 were taken from the World Values Survey (WVS), which covers twenty-eight countries in the TRI*M sample. For data on hypothesis 2 (pertaining to government performance) we turned to the European Social Survey (ESS), which includes fewer countries.

Because two different data sources were used, there were two different sets of country samples. In order to allow for direct comparison between hypotheses, we conducted the statistical analysis first for all available countries with TRI*M scores in either sample, and then again for the core of fifteen European countries represented in both samples (see Table 1).