Talk:Political colour/Archive 1

Accuracy dispute
I never really heard of any color being associated with the Libertarian Party. Media networks don't usually have a standard color for the Libertarian Party, occasionally gray or yellow is used.

For the Republicans and Democrats, what is the claim of no single official color? Since the 2000 election, media networks have held on to the Republican-red/Democratic-blue association, and both parties have accepted these colors to be used for now on. Doesn't that count as an official color?

Also, the American Communist Party is listed as Red. Is this official or assumed? Red was the color of the SOVIET Communist party. In the U.S., Red is pretty much an official color of the Republican Party. The American Communist Party is merely a third party now, somewhat like a "fourth party". Andros 1337 12:28, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Red is used internationally as a colour of communism and other forms of socialism. John Anderson 07:43, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I edited the "black" color section to note that its primarily associated with anarchism, and has been since the 1880's (see: Anarchist symbolism) and moved the association with fascism to a subpoint.
 * it appears someone undid that. I think it should be discussed here because I don't know which is more common of a usage. As an anarchist, I've always thought of black as primarily anarchistic, but I could be wrong. I also know that some muslims use black flags during protests (I think they are radical muslims, but that could just be american media bias). For now I will mention both fascism and anarchism as using it a lot, and also look more into the muslim usage. I think it has something to do with clerics (I could be totally wrong though).
 * Changed my mind, I made anarchism the primary identification with fascism being a subpoint. Anyone can feel free to change that, just discuss it first. Also, the disambiguation page for black flag mentions the black flag as a symbol of Islam.

I agree that it is set in stone now and hardly an issue which needs to be debated. Blue: Democrat, Red: Republican. Remember that the elephant and the donkey were never official either, but originally pejorative. Whether from a Nast political cartoon or tv news graphics, Americans aren't so hung up on whether its official or not. It has simply become part of the American consciousness and lexicon (red state, blue state, etc.), that's all the validation I need.

The US Communist party hasn't even been on the radar since McCarthy. Only the Socialist Party USA, Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Workers Party and Workers World Party make it on ballots and the Democratic Socialist party is notable too, though largely comprised of radical registered democrats. But yes red is the color by historical and international default, of course. The US truly does reverse things in regards to blue and red!

What is with the Black Panthers? There is no Black Panther party anymore. Why not list the Whigs?! ;-) Instead we might add parties like the Constitution party - which is reeeaal original and uses red, white, and blue. I'll keep the Black Panthers just for historical usage and 70's nostalgia, but its removal should be strongly considered. And yes the Libertarians do use blue, but might as well adopt another color like gold, like the LibDems. But all in all, the US parties don't even have official flags, banners, pomp or circumstance. Just the stars and stripes, which every party tries to wrap themselves in more than the other. I'm pretty much alone with my penchant for pageantry here in the states.
 * There is a "New Black Panther Party for Self Defense" though they have pretty much no connection with the original BPP.

I did change "the somewhat left-wing Democratic Party of the United States" to centre left, even though by British and European standards the US Democratic party is a little right of centre. If a PolySci grad has a better term, go ahead! Khirad 03:17, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

I changed the "which the right-wing Republican Party" to centre right, to keep it fair and unbiased. There are many Republicans that do not associate themselves with the right-wing movement, and are considered moderate/centre. Rmgrotkierii 22:06, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

reference
''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.''

I would love to see a reference on that. Wouter Lievens 10:36, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Communist Party USA
I have removed Communist Party USA from the list. While historically significant, they are not a major player in modern politics. If they should be included, we should include all active third parties, which would make the list unwieldy. Andros 1337 19:50, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

'''This list is full of "third" parties for many countries. Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, most of the EU countries.''' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.132.211.219 (talk) 22:22, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Republican Party (United States)
''In the United States since 2004, it is associated with the conservative Republican Party. Even though the colours are supposed to change every 4 years, the mainstream media has gone to great lengths to associate red with Republicans to such a degree that it will likely not change again.''

There's apparently no reference for changing the association from 2000 to 2004, the concept that "colours are supposed to change every four years" or that there was a conscious effort by the "mainstream media" to associate red with the Republican Party (which, further, sounds accusatory). If all that's true and can be cited, it would make sense that a similar note be put on the association of blue with the Democratic Party, but the situation is explained pretty clearly in the next section down (and is contradictory with this edit). Reverting for now. Murphyr (talk) 08:34, 10 October 2008 (UTC)


 * In fact there's a lot of confusion and mythologising about what the colours used prior to the aftermath of the 2000 election were - see Red states and blue states. It seems that there was never a universal set of colours and all they were ever really used for was to show the map at a glance. It was only in 2000 that people stopped to look at maps heavily and so the colour scheme became what it is simply because that's when the music stopped. Timrollpickering (talk) 21:42, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

The use of blue (Democrat) and red (Republican) with their current affiliations on electoral college maps in newspapers and television goes back at least to 1988. It seems it was after 2000 that familiarity with these affiliations became mainstream meme. There has been an effort, mostly by the conservative online community in the United States -- because of perceived negative symbolism of the color red -- to disassociate or switch the understood color affiliations. Because these color affiliations have not been embraced by the parties themselves, I think Wikipedia would be well-served by a more vigorous explanation of the affiliations, and their level of officiousness or speciousness. However, I also recommend the WikiCops keep a strong vigilance on this page, as they would would on any in which generally accepted principles conflict with the beliefs or political aspirations of a vocal minority. Misopogon (talk) 21:36, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

red and white in Italy

 * In Italy [white] is the colour, with red, of Catholic parties, because of the symbol of the blazon "Argent, a cross Gules".

And what is the symbol of that blazon? As St George's cross it can stand for England; I think it's also the coat of arms of some Italian city (likely more than one) — but I doubt that's the point here. I simplified the language to


 * In Italy a red cross on a white field stands for Catholic parties.

...but I still don't know why. —Tamfang (talk) 03:35, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

taking exception to the exceptions
Most of the "Exceptions" are not exceptions, it seems to me. Any objection to stripping most of that section? —Tamfang (talk) 03:55, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Political Colour
Do not move again. On wikipedia the American English spelling is used. Frvwfr2 19:05, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Please see WP:ENGVAR before making similar changes. VMS Mosaic 20:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree. (dot)com is US... US commerce, so all on (dot)com should remain US standard. Enough of the imperialistic rhetoric... we are not ruled by the empire and never will be again. History is history and it should not be changed or redefined by an online "encyclopedia" AmerIHCan (talk) 20:52, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I tried to get the talk page back but it still has one redirect. Perhaps someone else can clean it up? VMS Mosaic 20:28, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * You are correct that we don't move pages between varieties of English, but please do not correct a move by simply copying the article back to the old location and creating a redirect. Doing that breaks up the article's history.  I'm straightening up the move now. -GTBacchus(talk) 23:11, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I messed up trying to correct the move before discovering the right way to do it. VMS Mosaic 23:19, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No worries. -GTBacchus(talk) 23:22, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

CDU
Some anonymous editor said it was rubbish to include orange as one of the colours of the german CDU, the CDU article however also says "traditionally: Black; campaign colour: Orange". So I reverted it. C mon 07:00, 18 October 2006 (UTC)


 * It still doesn't make too much sense -- if you do it like this, you'll have to include "red-white" for SPÖ, ÖVP and FPÖ in Austria, as all those three parties like to use our flag's colours in political campaigns. I'd strongly advocate only using the colour(s) usually associated with the respective parties in political organigrams and election results; I've removed orange for now, though if you disagree and re-add it, I won't remove it again until we've got a consensus on this. &mdash; Nightst a  llion  (?) 17:19, 30 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I added it back because orange is a common CD color, and I think it is legitimate to include campaign colors.  GUÐSÞEGN  – UTEX – 14:33, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

it is “Pantone 144 C”
(to be precise:) “Genau gesagt:” Pantone 144 C. “So heißt der CDU-Farb-Code, ...” (this is the CDU colour code name ...), see www.sueddeutsche.de (SZ) cdu-und-die-farbe-orange --129.69.141.80 (talk) 15:09, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Move list to new page
I think the list section of this page would be best moved to an article of its own. Anyone agree? LukeSurlt c 19:44, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Support. Perhaps even remove the list completely. It's not essential, and many of the countries listed the party colours aren't generally considered important or recognised.--Autospark (talk) 12:49, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Any suggestions for a name? List of political colours of political parties is descriptive but clunky. Like you Autospark I'd be pretty ambivalent over whether this was actually kept or not, but I think such a bulk of information should go up for an AfD (or similar) discussion before being removed entirely. LukeSurlt c 17:32, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, I've made the move. I think the space freed up in this article could be used for a discussion of the history of colour in political symbolism. LukeSurlt c 10:46, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Merge suggestion

 * Heading added for unmarked topic by czar   &middot;   &middot;  21:50, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

This article should be merged with Political_party. --Jiang 05:16, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

On blue representing Democrats in the US

 * Heading added for unmarked topic by czar   &middot;   &middot;  21:50, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

On Blue representing Democrats in the US - "This is likely due to the Democratic Party starting out as a Conservative party, although it is less-so now, as it has evolved over time."

This is just conjecture that's not even accurate. From what I understand the assignment of red/blue was arbitrary and differed from network to network even during the 2000 election. --Fellnearshiva 00:36, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

'Blanco' and 'Colorado' parties in Latin America
Should we not add something about Blanco (conservative) versus Colorado (liberal) parties in Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia (?), Dominican Republic, others?--Bancki (talk) 09:51, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

By country (Norway)
Blue, right side, corporate connected parties. Green, center, agricultural parties. Red, left side, socialists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sundgot (talk • contribs) 20:40, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Remove list entirely?
The listing (divided by colour) is getting pretty long and is very under-referenced. At the current rate it could expand to have a bullet point on almost every political party in the world. I wonder, would we lose much by cutting it altogether? Two or three examples (Red = socialism, the green movement) could be used in the main prose. --LukeSurlt c 21:37, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * A lot of the information, such as the official color of a party, is fairly common knowledge and would not necessarily need many references. And I think it is useful to list the information both by color and by country. That said, this entire page is more of a list than an article. Could it be reformatted as such - move to List of political colours? Anything that still needs a prose explanation would stay here at the article page. Fishal (talk) 13:44, 26 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I think the article is fine the way it is now, although of course it could use more references (however, much of it is common knowledge, as Fishal pointed out). The problem with restricting the article to prose is that it would become a stub. There isn't much to say on this topic except that political parties and movements often use distinctive colours to identify themselves. That can be said in just a couple of sentences. Any other information is necessarily a list of which colours are used by which parties. If we removed the list, the same information would simply trickle back in over time. Perhaps it would be organized differently, but it would still be the same information (i.e. which colours are used by which parties). -- Amerul (talk) 07:07, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Europe, blue
What could you say about the light blue colour on the flag of the EU? Thank you. - 89.110.28.135 (talk) 17:59, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Need Segment for "Color Combinations"
American Patriot Party (2003) - Red white and blue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.39.252.131 (talk) 21:15, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Green
Check your ethnocentrism; ALL of the world's Muslim Parties were completely omitted form this page/section. sheeesssh. Did a little editing,. Still more Green Muslim parties to add.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:21, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Table representation
The article is very difficult to follow. Maybe it could be improved by representing it as a table. Different countries as rows and columns as different colors. Cells in table could have shaded background of the colour, party's name and possibly logo. Notable exceptions (as red Republicans in the US could be drawn attention by using short comments in the specific cell to easily draw attention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.48.83.151 (talk) 02:05, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
 * The solution could be translating the spanish wikipedia article into english. --Marco Craso (talk) 17:19, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Is it time to clean this article up?
Originally this article used to be about certain colours representing certain ideologies. However, over the past few years it's evolved into listing every bit of branding used by a political party, whether it's notable or not. I mean, there's even a bullet that says, "In Greece, red is the colour of the Communist Party of Greece". Well, obviously.

Where are we going to draw the line here? Is the colour of every party notable, or are we going to reserve it for ideologies, movements, and notable symbolism? Or should there be a middleground? Right this is turning into an unwieldy indiscriminate collection of information. —  Czello  07:24, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Czello: Yes please! As you correctly assess, this article is an uninteresting list of "In country X, political party Y uses colour Z". It's easy to see how this has built up one edit at a time into an INDISCRIMINATE collection, despite not actually being a list article.
 * What would be really useful is an article about the concept of Political Colours. Why are they used? What is their history? How are they connected to other forms of political symbolism and broader color symbolism? What are the global trends? Answering these questions would be really useful - unfortunately it would also require a lot of work to do this while avoiding WP:OR - we're pretty much looking at needing to find and summarise tertiary sources that have already addressed these questions.
 * If you're willing to give this a go I would support you 100%, even if it requires pretty much deleting the entire article and starting from scratch. --LukeSurlt c 11:30, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply. I'm definitely going to see what I can do to improve this, and have requested the help of Wikiproject politics.
 * Suggestion: I think the fundamentals of the article are correct, it just needs to be massively reduced in scope. Once, a long time ago, I added the following bullet to this article: In the United Kingdom, purple is associated with Euroscepticism, being the official colours of the UK Independence Party (along with yellow) and the minor party Veritas. Granted, this was original research on my part (it could well be coincidence that both parties are purple), but I think this is broadly the philosophy we should take. "This colour can represent that movement", or "this colour symbolises that ideology". Things to that effect. Here's how I think it should work:
 * Stage 1: Go through the article and purge all bullets that simply state "In, the uses ." This will immediately remove most of the indiscriminate and trivial fluff from the article.
 * Stage 2: Ensure that each bullet list is confined to ideologies, movements, and notable symbolism. This should all be rigidly sourced (my above Eurosceptic example will have to go, sob).
 * Stage 3: Expand the paragraphs under each heading to better discuss the meaning of the colours and what part they've played in movements. Again, this should all be rigidly sourced.
 * The end result will hopefully be less of an arbitrary list, and instead more of an actual analytical article with limited accompanying examples. —  Czello  15:44, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Czello: Sounds like a substantial improvement! Go for it :) --LukeSurlt c 17:07, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
 * It is unacceptable Czello to forbid new additions of parties to this article if the article mentions them already. It has been built this way and this you cannot quote them, you just cannot illustrate. So if you think there shall be no individual parties on this article, clean it first before blocking the work of others. --PurpleEyes (talk) 08:41, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * There appears to be a consensus here against including individual parties if they are not part of a border theme or area of notability. As above, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Listing the colour of any political party, regardless of how notable its colour is, is a fairly arbitrary and indiscriminate list. However, if you feel there are some parties that still need to be removed, let me know and I can remove them. As far as I can see the majority have gone, except in some circumstances where we're talking about the impact their colour has had. Also, please do not edit war: let's continue to discuss here. — Czello 08:51, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * , while I believe the article needs an almost complete overhaul, I am in agreement with . The cleanup of the article needs to be done as one big motion, rather than reverting additions until someone gets round to making the necessary big edits. Otherwise it just comes across as WP:OWNERSHIP. --LukeSurlt c 12:41, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree that I've been slow on making the bigger changes suggested above; truth be told I've been hoping more people would contribute, especially from the wikiproject (not least to avoid it looking like a case of WP:OWNERSHIP). The main person I've seen helping is who has been rather helpful, especially for sourcing things. However, I don't think allowing non-notable/isolated examples without a broader context is a good decision, and is a step backwards for the article. A reminder that this is what it used to look like, and what I'm hoping to avoid a return to. Even with the slow progress towards a more analytical article, I don't think re-adding arbitrary mentions of parties is an improvement. — Czello 15:30, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

My take is we need to clamp down on all individual parties and instead have a more general list. As an example, the Soviet Union should definitely have a section in red, and antifa and maybe the free territory and black, but this should be more general. Also there is a massive amount of repetition, as an example red constantly lists socialist parties, but it already makes clear socialists use red, so why have it? I agree with Czello to a certain extent but there should still be general notable examples, maybe this could be split into: List of political party colors/colours and Political colour. The issue being the list are currently the main focus of the article. Vallee01 (talk) 23:35, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
 * List_of_ideological_symbols pretty much is that list already, though it's a bit hidden in a corner of the wiki. I think an organised split between the list and prose elements of this article would be a very good thing. --LukeSurlt c 08:41, 22 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I do agree with 's view of what the article should be like. Personally my issue with List_of_ideological_symbols is the same as it is here (WP:INDISCRIMINATE), but that's an issue for that page (and someone else). If that article wants to list individual parties than that gives us even more scope to make this one more analytical. — Czello 08:38, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

Ribbons?
What is the significance of blue ribbons being worn at political AND sporting assemblies, during the nineteenth century? It would appear to refer only to 'winning' ('we are the champions'), not to any political affiliation. In the Australian colonial era, wearing a blue ribbon in the hat was considered a politically provocative act, and was adopted by persons avowing political liberty, persons NOT of the conservative stripe.

Its origin remains unclear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:44B8:3102:BB00:B082:9FF6:254B:663C (talk) 23:08, 21 January 2021 (UTC)