Political colour: Encyclopedia II - Political colour - Exceptions

Political colour - Exceptions

Political parties vary the shades of their colours depending on the situations. Most U.S. politicians use red, white and blue together. In the UK, the Labour Party has recently used bold red with yellow lettering in areas of majority Labour support but also more purple tones in marginal Conservative areas.

Other notable exceptions and variations to the above colour schemes are:

• In Australia, the Australian Labor Party will typically use red, and the Liberal Party of Australia typically blue, however this does conform to the above colour scheme as the "liberal" party is in reality conservative and the ALP identifies itself as a socialist party. The Australian Greens use green, while a green-and-gold combination is used both by the National Party of Australia and the Australian Democrats. The colours for the latter, however, are not ideological in nature, but are derived from the fact that Australia's national colours are green and gold.

• In Austria, the Social Democrats are traditionally branded red while the conservative Austrian People's Party is associated with black. The far-right nationalist Freedom Party of Austria is blue and the Green's colour is green.

• In Belgium, the Liberal Democrats (VLD and MR) are blue and the Christian Democrats (CD&V and CDH) are orange. The colour of the Flemish nationalists (N-VA) is yellow. No consistent colour is used for the right-wing nationalist Vlaams Belang, colour used in media or campaigns include white, purple, brown and yellow.

• In Canada, the official colour for the New Democratic Party is orange, while the Liberal Party of Canada uses red, the Conservative Party of Canada uses blue, and the Bloc Québécois uses light blue.

• In Germany, the Social Democrats are traditionally branded red while the conservative Christian Democrats are black. The Liberal party is yellow, and the Greens are unsurprisingly green. In East Germany, the youth association of the communist party used a blue flag.

• In Mexico, the leftist PRD uses yellow.

• In the Netherlands, conservative Liberals (VVD) are blue, Liberal Democrats (D66) use green as well as the Christian Democrats. Green Left uses both green and red to represent its blend of ecologism and leftism.

• In Northern Ireland, the Protestant parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly are called the "orange block" and the Catholic parties are the "green block".

• In Portugal, the moderate conservatives (Social-Democrat Party, whose name may cause confusion, since it is not a traditional social-democrat party, but much more right-leaning) are orange and the socialists are pink.

• In Taiwan, the leading groups of parties are the more Chinese nationalist Pan-Blue Coalition and the more Taiwanese independence Pan-Green Coalition. The New Party uses yellow as its party colour even though its policies are conservative; the Democratic Progressive Party uses green even though its international alignment is with the Liberal International and not the Green parties.

• In the UK (excluding Northern Ireland), where electoral rosettes are commonly worn for campaigns, the Conservatives use dark blue; Labour, red; and the Liberal Democrats, yellow. With many other smaller parties choosing their own colour schemes, Independents unsurprisingly use white. Notably the single issue UK Independence Party has chosen to use the non-aligned colour purple with yellow.
  • Additionally some of the established political parties use or have used colour variations in their own locality. For instance the traditionally colour of the Penrith & the Border Conservatives is yellow, and not dark blue. Also the traditionally colour of the Warwickshire Liberals was green, and not orange/yellow.

• In the United States there is no official association between political parties and specific colours. The two major political parties use the national colours — red, white, and blue — to show their patriotism. The only common situation in which it has been necessary to assign a single colour to a party has been in the production of political maps in graphical displays of election results. In such cases, there has historically been no consistent association of particular parties with particular colours. In the weeks following the 2000 election, however, there arose the terminology of blue states and red states, in which the centre-right Republican Party was associated with red and the centre-left Democratic Party with blue. Political observers subsequently latched on to this association, which resulted from the use of red for Republican victories and blue for Democratic victories on the display map of a television network. This association has certainly not been consistently applied in the past: during previous presidential elections, about half of the television networks used the opposite association. In 2004, the association was mostly kept.

(There is some historical use of blue for Democrats and red for Republicans — in the late 19th century and early 20th century, Texas county election boards used colour coding to help Spanish speakers and illiterates identify the parties.[1] However, this system was not applied consistently in Texas and was not picked up on a national level.)

Maps for presidential elections produced by the U.S. government use the opposite system, with red for Democrats and blue for Republicans — for example, see U.S. presidential election, 1992.

Nevertheless, since the 2000 election the news media have tended to use red for Republicans and blue for Democrats, especially as it relates to the electoral majority in each state, informally calling them the Red states and Blue states. The colour green is often used for the Green Party, and the colour yellow is often used for the Libertarian Party.

A February 2004 article in the New York Times examined this issue.[2]

In a video released by the White House depicting Christmas celebrations there, Karl Rove is seen tearing blue ornaments off the Christmas tree, replacing them with red ones. This is a reference to the political colours.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Exceptions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki