Strategies for Sustaining Success: Ideological Positioning and Fashioning a Party Brand

It has long been argued in the political science literature that a successful party strategy in a highly competitive environment involves, in part, placing the party on the ideological spectrum at a position where a substantial number of voters are located but competitor parties are noticeably absent. This issue positioning helps parties distinguish themselves from their rivals, providing voters a clear way to identify and differentiate their choices. While the AfD’s primary means to achieve success in this fashion thus far has been issue entrepreneurship through the exploitation and performance of crises, a key factor in sustaining such electoral success is both having a clearly demarcated “brand” or party identity and constructing an accompanying political agenda (i.e., ideology) that reaches beyond a single issue. Indeed, fashioning a brand and building a political agenda are crucial for sustained success; otherwise, a party risks becoming a one-trick pony whose electoral fortunes depend entirely on the saliency of the one issue the party happens to be championing. In this chapter, we analyze the ways the AfD has provided voters an increasingly professionalized competitor party in the electoral market with a (more or less) coherent ideological platform and party brand.