An increasing number of studies highlight the ideological backlash created by past dictatorships, but little is known about its effects on party competition in new democracies. How do political entrepreneurs, who might otherwise align with the former regime's ideology, respond to the stigma attached to that side? Building on signaling theory, we argue that one response parties can adopt is to strategically name themselves in such a way so as to signal their ideological distance from the past dictatorship. Through a well-powered pre-registered survey, we ask 1,000 independent coders to guess the ideological side of approx. 1,500 European parties and their position on the Left-Right (L-R) scale only via the party name (in English). We then assess relative success in predictions, depending on the degree of alignment of parties to the stigmatized ideological side, benchmarking coders’ evaluations to the assessments of experts from CMP and CHES. Our analyses show that parties that are more Right-Wing (Left-Wing) will be perceived by coders as being less so in former Right-Wing (Left-Wing) regimes, compared to those in so-called mature democracies. This effect appears to be driven by parties on the Dictator’s Side (DS): the distance between the L-R scores assigned by coders and experts is, in fact, more positive (more negative) in former Left-Wing (Right-Wing) dictatorships than in established democracies for parties located on the DS, compared to parties from the non-DS.