The Name of the Game: Party Branding in Post-Authoritarian Regimes

Do dictatorships create an ideological backlash in new democracies? Existing evidence documents shifts in public opinion and party supply, but cannot distinguish genuine preference change from stigma attached to former regimes. We address this by focusing on the actors most vulnerable to such stigma: parties aligned with the Dictator’s ideological Side (DS). If backlash is genuine, parties’ policy platforms and the heuristics signaling them should shift in tandem; if stigma operates, heuristic signals should move more than policy. To isolate this divergence, we compare parties’ names - highly visible yet non-binding cues - to manifesto-based ideological positions. In a preregistered survey, 988 UK-based respondents guessed the ideology of 1,604 parties from 53 countries using only their English-translated names. Names are markedly less informative about "true" ideology in post-authoritarian regimes than in mature democracies; a gap driven by DS parties, systematically perceived as more centrist than their manifestos indicate.