For a fun experiment, try Google finance with the Japanese language tag (https://www.google.com/finance/?hl=ja). Even knowing about the switched colors, it still fools my eyes. Goes to show how deeply ingrained the usual red/green assignment is!
Reminds me of the time I heard from someone much older than me that Democrats and Republicans switched from being red or blue almost every year until 2000 when the election results were so uncertain that people got used to seeing red=Republican and blue=Democrat for weeks and the color scheme just ended up becoming permanent.
As a (younger) politics junkie I was shocked even though it makes total sense and I've always kinda felt they should've been switched.
The color red seems to politically date back to the French revolution and has since been mostly associated with the far left of the political spectrum in seemingly all places except the modern US (thanks, GOP). Likewise brown is typically associated with fascists and nazis (due to the "brownshirts").
Annoyingly my home country (Germany) uses both black and blue to indicate conservative or right-wing parties. Conservatives being indicated in blue seems to be somewhat common internationally but black is historically tied to anarchism (which uses a black flag to be the flag of all people that no one country can claim, unlike the white flag of surrender).
That far left political party associated with red in other countries barely exists in in the US.
The GOP being “red” and Democrats being “blue” were not colors chosen by the parties. In the seventies, Television broadcasters started using colors to identify voting trends and soon enough they all settled on those particular colors for the parties. There may have been some attempt to not use red for Democrats to avoid reinforcing the “lefty” stereotype.
Yeah, but only because you can't really have "shades" of black. The CSU and AfD are both indicated as blue the same way the SPD and Die Linke are both indicated as red, but usually different shades (or e.g. using magenta for Die Linke, which is even sillier as Die Linke is to the left of the SPD).
Every party has an official color of course, but they're not always used in reporting. For example, while the CSU uses blue for its logo, the CDU uses red but still is traditionally represented in black.
I'm not sure if you're joking but the only reference I can find is the "Blue Dog Coalition" which takes its name from "being choked blue" and the term "yellow dog Democrat", which in turn seems to refer to what now goes by "vote blue no matter who" in the sense of "they would vote for a yellow dog as long as it is Democrat", which in turn uses "yellow dog" to refer to "low value" American dogs with no genetic link to any established European dog breed.
Whew, what a ride for a non-American to figure out what any of these idioms are supposed to mean.
“blue dog democrat” Was a term for some conservatives, mostly living in the US south, who were registered as Democrats. When Nixon executed his “southern strategy”, many of those democrats switch to the Republican Party and are probably a big reason why that party switched from a moderately conservative, corporatist party to what it is today.
There are a number of noun phrases with colors on them that have political meaning, that's different than the color alone, not in combination with the modified noun, having political meaning.
Left and right themselves just refer to where groups sat in the revolutionary National Assembly. At this point the terms, like “conservative”, have become labels without meaning in US politics.
I'd agree that calling the Dems and GOP "left and right" is somewhat meaningless but historically the left-right spectrum was originally about "power to the people" vs "power to the king" and has been generalized to "hierarchies bad" vs "hierarchies good". Of course this is a spectrum because there are many dimensions in which politics can be "left" or "right" (e.g. social norms, welfare, spending, policing, regulations).
The problem with the Democrats and the Republicans isn't that they're two coherent parties. They're both parent organizations for state-level parties which can be politically extremely different from each other. And those parties can themselves be ideologically incoherent because people join them simply because there is no point in joining a third party instead, not to mention that in some cases in-party election (e.g. the primaries) allow non-members to vote, which further messes with their political coherence. And don't even get me started on how PACs and big donors affect campaigning.
Did that propagate to other countries afterwards then? For example left and right in the UK have the same meaning as I understand them to have in the US although of course in the US all parties are right of what the UK would call centre.
Looking at parliament's the left-right thing the French created spread.
Not to the UK however. In the British Parliament seating is based on governing party (right side of the Speaker (Commons) or right side of the Throne (House of Lords) and the opposition on the other side)
However for example in Germany there was a relatively big debate earlier in this legislative period, when the liberal party (FDP) wanted to move to the center, switching seats with the conservatives (CDU/CSU) to move away from the far right party (AfD) The "traditional" left-right spectrum was a key argument in the debate.
Liberal in most of the rest of the world usually means something similar to "neoliberal" which is usually thought of as a moderate or conservative ideology.
When you say liberal, do you mean it in the way it's used in the US (a stand-in for "leftist") or the way it's used in the rest of the world?
This is a recent development. When gay marriage was less popular among voters a couple decades ago, "conservative" meant "neoconservatism", which was exactly the same as neoliberalism, but without the LGBT+.
(I hope that I have now successfully offended every political ideology that claims to have centuries of philosophical backing behind it.)
And then there's Korea, where every party is re-created every few years. In the past decades liberals tried green, yellow, and (currently) blue. Conservatives had blue, red, pink, and now back to red.
Oh wow, that greatly varies from locales to locales. Not only the color can be swapped depending on the locale, but the specific color can also change. For example the Korean locale (hl=ko) uses red for up (same to Japanese) but uses blue in place of red for down. Both languages have a single native word for blue-or-green or "grue" so either should work in principle, but I have no idea why Korean specifically uses blue. In my brief check there is only one more locale (Khmer, hl=km) where blue is used in place of green (for up in this case).
I know Japan likes red, but I'm surprised that the TSE uses green for a negative/falling connotation. That's not a Japanese cultural thing generally, AFAIK.
Is this just a historical path-dependent thing — e.g. stock-exchange trading floors traditionally all buying their sign boards from some specialty company that produced boards specialized to have exactly two "color channels" — red and green — and then, when the TSE got theirs, it was all they could do to just wire the color channels up backwards?
(I guess there are a few types of meters that always use red as high and green as low — e.g. pressure gauges. But that's because red in those cases means danger. A high stock value isn't dangerous!)
You have, like, two natural choices of contrasts to red: green and blue, maybe black/white. There may be more involved reasons why green is more globally common as a second color choice than blue, but I don't think it's surprising that they use a green even without special cultural connotations.
Right now on websites it's not displayed as green, but blue (or greenish blue).
Even the traffic light is called blue here (青) and they would look at you with surprise if you say the lights are green!
