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Political parties are typically seen as conservative institutions which rarely change. Despite this common perception, parties do change, and on occasion, transform themselves by changing features such as the party name and logo, or their policy program. How can we conceptualize these kinds of changes, and what are the electoral consequences for parties which change in these ways? In this paper, I argue that feature changes and policy changes are instances of party rebranding, or situations where a party attempts to overhaul its entire image. I then test the electoral consequences of feature and policy rebrands on a dataset of 239 political parties from 1945 to 2019. The results indicate that feature rebrands increase party vote share for the election after the rebrand, while policy rebrands have no effect. These findings have implications for our understanding of parties themselves and the kinds of party signals that voters respond to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents news briefs on political science, political parties, practical politics, elections, and the cabinet system in Finland under Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen. Leehna Luhtanen is Minister of Justice while Susanna Huovinen is Minister of Transport and Communication. Strikes and lockouts in the pulp and paper industry dominated presidential campaigns.