MERCHANDISING DEMOCRACY: INSIDE THE ONLINE INDUSTRY OF CAMPAIGN MERCHANDISE

During the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, campaign merch was all around America, visible on highways, in grocery stores, and in neighborhood yards and windows. And yet, political communication researchers have widely ignored this site of political communication. Historical research like that of Roger Fischer and Michael Schudson make it clear that popular political products are not new in America, but their work also illustrates the important interactions between consumerism, technology, and politics. America today is at a distinct intersection of mass consumerism, brand culture, digital technology, and contentious politics. This intersection makes online marketplaces of political products uniquely suited to understand what I call Political Identity Brands.The primary contribution of this dissertation is to present Political Identity Brands as a theoretical concept. To date, social science researchers have used Social Identity Theory to measure people’s attachments to groups without necessarily understanding what those groups are; simultaneously, political marketing researchers have used branding theories to understand what a brand is without necessarily understanding what it means when someone considers a brand a part of their identity. This dissertation argues that branding and Social Identity Theory are complementary and together capture how people construct their identities in our modern brand culture. This dissertation describes the modern Political Identity Brands of progressive and conservative based on textual and content analyses of merchandise websites. As a second contribution, this dissertation adds to the growing body of literature in communication and media studies on how digital platforms shape adjacent fields. Through in-depth interviews, website analysis, and survey of merchandise buyers, this dissertation shows the growing importance of online sales platforms and data infrastructure for political campaigning. The third primary contribution of this dissertation is to develop baseline descriptions of who buys campaign merch and why from two surveys. These findings speak to the importance of understanding the online industry of political products and campaign merchandise. Taken together, this dissertation examines an important, underacknowledged medium of political communication and demonstrates how it is useful for understanding the intersection of politics and consumerism today.