A picture is worth a thousand words: Political party logos and logo change

Virtually all political parties in Western Europe have a logo which is at the forefront of their promotional material. Despite their centrality to the party’s image, there has been little cross-national research on party logos. One likely reason for this is data limitations, as we have thus far lacked a comprehensive dataset on party logos. To fill this gap, this article introduces the “Political Parties Logos Database” (PPLD), the first comprehensive, cross-national database of party logos. In this article, we first introduce the PPLD and then use the database to empirically examine why parties change their logo. Drawing on seminal work on party change, we argue that parties change their logo after decreases in their electoral performance or changes in their party leader. Using the PPLD, we find little to no evidence that changes to a party’s electoral performance increases the probability of a party changing its logo. In contrast, we find strong evidence that changes to the party’s leader, moderated by the strength of the leader, predict party logo change. These results highlight the importance of party leaders for understanding party change while also demonstrating the utility of the PPLD.