The selling of the President 2004: a marketing perspective

• George W. Bush won the 2004 US Presidential election despite the facts of one thousand people losing their life in the Iraq war, the highest rate of increase in unemployment in 70 years and a vitriolic propaganda campaign (Michael Moore, etc.) against him. This case study seeks to explain the success through the prism of marketing theory and conceptual structures, that is, that the Bush team had a superior communications strategy and, within those parameters, superior marketing elements. Thus we seek to surface and integrate a number of causal explanations for his victory that arose from a political marketing orientation, specifically the offer of a ‘coherent narrative’; the conduct of a ‘permanent campaign’; more effective negative advertising (especially by pro‐Bush 527 groups), targeting and packaging; the success of the late campaign ‘big tent’ ploy. None of this however seeks to exclude the more purely political explanations for his success (located in such phenomena as the mobilization of the ‘Christian Right’ and the continuity to the aura attached to the ‘911 President’); nor is the application of marketing thought to political contexts treated uncritically.
• A further aim is to introduce political marketing modes of analysis to a political science audience—not to present them as a new ‘correctness’, for they are certainly vulnerable to challenge, but rather to precipitate more of an intellectual exchange between these two disciplines.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Marketing

Abstract

This paper examines the emerging practices and literature of what has been termed ‘political marketing.’ It attempts, through an investigation of underlying theoretical frameworks, to shed light on the impact and implications of this ‘new’ phenomenon. Specifically, it examines whether the above mentioned practices can rightfully be seen as transforming political parties into professional market-oriented organizations, as has been claimed in some recent academic studies. It does so by introducing and examining an increasingly strong-positioned marketing paradigm, services/relationship marketing. This paradigm's focus on the organizational perspective of marketing is discussed as is its applicability to analysis of politics and democracy. Furthermore the paper links this discussion to the wider concern over the ‘crisis in democracy’ resulting from a decline in civic engagement, decreasing voter turnouts and declining party-membership.     

The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe

This article presents the findings of a collaborative research project involving seven field teams across Europe investigating a range of new political phenomena termed ‘subterranean politics’. The article argues that the social mobilizations and collective activities in 2011 and 2012 were probably less joined up, more heterogeneous, and, perhaps, even, smaller, than similar phenomena during the last decade, but what was striking was their ‘resonance’ among mainstream public opinion—the ‘bubbling up’ of subterranean politics. The main findings included:

• ??Subterranean political actors perceive the crisis as a political crisis rather than a reaction to austerity. Subterranean politics is just as much a characteristic of Germany, where there are no austerity policies, as other countries.

• ??Subterranean political actors are concerned about democracy but not as it is currently practised. They experiment with new democratic practises, in the squares, on the Internet, and elsewhere.

• ??This new political generation not only uses social networking to organize but the Internet has profoundly affected the culture of political activism.

• ??In contrast to mainstream public debates, Europe is ‘invisible’ even though many subterranean political actors feel themselves to be European.

The research concludes that the term ‘subterranean politics’ is a useful concept that needs further investigation and that Europe needs to be problematized to seek a way out of the crisis.     

Representation as a median mandate: Taking cross‐national differences seriously

The extent and ways in which popular preferences influence government policy are absolutely central to our understanding of modern democracy. Paul Warwick's discussion of these in the European Journal of Political Research in 2010 puts itself at the heart of the debate with its critique of the median mandate theory of McDonald and Budge, proposing an alternative ‘bilateralist’ concept of representation. This article questions whether this concept has much to add to our theoretical understanding of representational processes. However, Warwick's further conceptual points deserve serious consideration. These concern the time horizons within which representative processes work, and the status of the median position given multi‐motivated voting. At the evidential level, Warwick argues that survey‐based measures of voter and party left–right positions fail to produce the correspondence between median and government policy positions that median mandate theory would have us expect. However, survey‐based measures of median voter and party placements obscure important cross‐national variation. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems ( CSES 2007 ), as Warwick does, this article shows that survey respondents norm their own and their country's party positions to their national context. The consequence is to make the political centre in all nations appear similar. Allowing for the relevant cross‐national differences brings the relationship between the median voter and government position back in line with expectations.     

Antecedents of political market orientation in Britain and Sweden: analysis and future research propositions

• During the last 20 years, political marketing has become a widespread phenomenon around the world. However, most of the research concerning political marketing has been carried out in countries such as the United States and Britain. Thus, in order to understand the antecedents of political marketing, as well as its effectiveness as an electoral strategy, there is a need for comparative research including countries that differ significantly from the U.S. and Britain.
• One such country is Sweden. Thus, the purpose of this article is to compare and analyze Sweden and Britain with regard to two analytical research questions: (1) What differences are there between Britain and Sweden that might be relevant in understanding why parties choose to be sales‐ or market‐oriented? (2) What are the implications with regards to differences between countries and between parties within countries that might help to explain why some parties in some countries are more likely than others to be market‐oriented?

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Too much of a good thing: the ‘problem’ of political communications in a mass media democracy

• Francis Fukuyama asks: ‘… is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?’ This paper argues that one of these ‘internal contradictions’ is the political communications process and it can be sufficiently serious to undermine the democratic system—but such an undermining is not inevitable. The problem can be described as follows: Democratic systems require that citizens are kept fully informed by governments (and others) in the interests of transparency and ultimately accountability. Hence, all political communications have, as their final objective, the accountability of politicians at the ballot box. Thus all political communications have what can be described as ‘above’ and ‘below’ the line content. The above‐the‐line is the actual content of the message, the below‐the‐line is the implicit one of ‘think better of me and my colleagues think worse of my opponents’. Consequently, no matter how personally honest and open an individual politician might be, the democratic system requires her or him to be always thinking about securing a successful result at the ballot box. Thus we have the ‘political communications paradox’. Voters want politicians to be honest and accountable but this very demand means that politicians, implicitly, always have to have another agenda in operation when they are communicating with the public, i.e. securing their approval and then their support. As a result the trust which is a fundamental to the workings of a democratic system is constantly being undermined. This has two effects. First, that governments are obliged to make communications, rather than delivery, their real priority and second trust, not just in politicians but in the political system as a whole, tends to wane over time, which in turn endangers the very system it was designed to underpin. But this decline is not inevitable because the system has some in‐built self‐correcting mechanisms These include: the rise of new parties and/or leaders who portray themselves as ‘new’ and ‘untainted’—New Labour, New Conservatives, etc., an almost regular ‘re‐balancing’ of the power relationship that exists between politicians and the civil service, particularly in the communications field, the rise of new forms of communication that seek to by‐pass the institutional roadblocks that are perceived as being the cause of the problems and finally increased attention by journalists and academics to the process of political communications makes it more difficult for politicians to continue with ‘business as usual’ as far as their communication activities are concerned.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Envisaging the future — scenarios and public affairs practice

Public affairs in the third millennium will develop in three significant ways.

• (1) It will deal increasingly with global issues and authorities. ‘The chief executive needs to be an entrepreneur with global vision. He needs political skills, to steer a course through the regulatory maze.’
• (2) The companies that succeed may be global, but many of the regimes of regulation and control will remain national. The ability to deal with them will be essential.
• (3) Public affairs will have to deal effectively not only with national and international regimes but also with organised ‘civil society’. NGOs have now formed global alliances. They are recognised and consulted formally and informally and have begun to ‘show their teeth’.

These developments create strong and specific challenges for corporate communications. ‘Sovereignty is what you belong to.’ The European Union (EU) has developed as a model for global public affairs. Companies that have learnt to combine national with supranational public affairs in the EU will be well equipped in the fora of WTO, OECD, ILO and others yet to come. The communications challenges are two:

• (1) Support for mergers: As globalisation proceeds by merger, companies will need fluency in communicating the benefits of mergers, both internally and externally.
• (2) Trading identities: As countries go for national brands to achieve tourism and investment, mega‐merged global companies are using nation‐building techniques to achieve internal cohesion across cultures.

Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Competitive analysis,structure and strategy in politics: a critical approach

• This article begins by arguing that the structure of the political market differs significantly from business markets and that, consequently, the prescribed strategies from ‘traditional’ marketing theory are not always appropriate in politics.
• Then the military metaphor is applied to the political market and its ability to illuminate competitive strategy in this market is explored. Particular attention is paid to the interaction of direct and indirect strategies in politics over the lifecycle of a parliament.
• The relevance of military principles in implementing the strategies identified is then considered. The paper concludes with a wider discussion of the limitations of the military/competitive model as applied to politics and a general indication of how a more comprehensive competitive model might be created.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

International political marketing: a case study of its application in China

• The practice of International Political Marketing can be seen increasingly in the foreign relations of independent states. A review of relevant Political Marketing and International Relations publications reveals close linkage between the two. Based on the review, this paper categorizes political marketing into three aspects: the election aspect, the governing aspect (permanent campaign) and the international aspect of political marketing. The focus of this study is on international political marketing which was defined based on the review. This paper then reports a case study of the utilization of International Political Marketing by the government of the People's Republic of China. It looks at the recent events of China's accession of the WTO in 2001, China's hosting of Sino‐African Summit in 2006 and the on going promotion of China's image of ‘Peaceful Development and Cooperation’. The paper advances the argument that practically all nation states and international organizations apply International Political Marketing to both their strategic planning as well as conduct of day‐to‐day affairs. The paper concludes that there is a great demand both at a theoretical as well as practical level for International Political Marketing, requiring further study.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Leading or Following?

Abstract

While research exists on how political parties use political marketing instruments, there is a lack of emphasis on strategic marketing, especially with regard to theoretical frameworks of political marketing orientation. This can be seen as problematic in the development of political marketing research as a subdiscipline of marketing and political science. A concept is suggested that defines a party's orientation towards political marketing management using two crucial elements of strategic marketing theory regarding customer orientation: leading and following. Three generic types of political parties are characterised by their strategic postures using their stance on these two elements. The implications of strategic postures for the fulfilment of certain political marketing functions and organisational issues are briefly discussed. While traditional parties with a rigid content-based approach towards policy-making can be characterised as Convinced Ideologists, contemporary catch-all parties have moved towards being Tactical Populists.

Whilst both these postures are prone to being perceived as dogmatic or untrustworthy and fickle, a third posture, that of Relationship Builder, is proposed. This integrates leading and following, by using a relational approach towards marketing, as suggested in the evolving literature on strategic marketing and marketing orientation. This Relationship Builder stance constitutes a theoretical posture that needs to be clarified by empirical research in the political arena. Thus, to foster further empirical and theoretical research, several propositions have been derived in a process that is in line with the demands of theory-building and hypothesis-driven exploration as suggested for this comparatively new discipline of political marketing.     

Marketing,truth and political expediency

• Countries have been built on the hopes, dreams and courage of refugees. In recent years, the global refugee problem has become more intense, and reactions from governments around the world have been generally negative. This paper explores and describes the way in which a hitherto unpopular Australian Government managed and communicated an apparent ‘refugee crisis’ to win an election campaign, using information known at the time to be untruthful. It compares the messages used to win the election with the truth that subsequently emerged, and relates this to political marketing, especially the theories of Machiavelli. It concludes by describing the situation post‐election and discusses some potential implications for public affairs.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political marketing in untraditional campaigns: the case of David Cameron's Conservative Party leadership victory

• This study investigates the concept of political market orientation (PMO) in an untraditional setting, namely the 2005 contest for the leadership of the British Conservative Party. Based on a collective case‐study method, a content analysis of candidates' speeches and manifestos is provided. We operationalize four attitudinal constructs of a conceptual PMO model and adapt them to suit the novel campaign context. Our findings show further evidence for the existance of a ‘gravitational centre’ effect hypothesized in earlier studies. Furthermore, we qualify the concept of PMO through a long‐term focus and a context‐specific evaluation of the merits of alternative PMO profiles. Thus, the generic conceptual model of political market orientatation, which previously has only been used in the content of parties contesting a general election campaign, can be adapted to alternative campaign situations without a reduction in its explanatory power.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The four Ps of corporate political activity: a framework for environmental analysis and corporate action

• In this paper, I propose a new integrated framework which may be used to conduct a thorough analysis of a firm's political environment. The four steps of the methodology include the problem (how a political problem emerges and can be shaped by actors), the procedure (the public decision‐making procedure), the policies (relevant public policies currently implemented) and the players (including policy‐makers as well as participants in the political debate). Together, they form what I call the ‘Four Ps of corporate political activity’.
• This framework can serve not only for environmental analysis and monitoring, but also to improve the effectiveness of a firm's attempts in the field of political influence, through actions such as arena selection, issue framing, the use of procedural opportunities, proactive negotiation of a compromise or gate‐keeping the political arena.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

International political marketing: a case study of United States soft power and public diplomacy

• Political marketing can be categorized with three aspects: the election campaign as the origin of political marketing, the permanent campaign as a governing tool and international political marketing (IPM) which covers the areas of public diplomacy, marketing of nations, international political communication, national image, soft power and the cross‐cultural studies of political marketing. IPM and the application of soft power have been practiced by nation‐states throughout the modern history of international relations starting with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nation‐states promote the image of their country worldwide through public diplomacy, exchange mutual interests in their bilateral or multilateral relation with other countries, lobby for their national interests in international organizations and apply cultural and political communication strategies internationally to build up their soft power. In modern international relations, nation‐states achieve their foreign policy goals by applying both hard power and soft power. Public diplomacy as part of IPM is a method in the creation of soft power, as well as, in the application of soft power.
• This paper starts with the definitional and conceptual review of political marketing. For the first time in publication, it establishes a theoretical model which provides a framework of the three aspects of political marketing, that is electoral political marketing (EPM), governmental political marketing (GPM) and IPM. This model covers all the main political exchanges among six inter‐related components in the three pairs of political exchange process, that is candidates and party versus voters and interest groups in EPM ; governments, leaders and public servants versus citizens and interest groups in GPM, including political public relations and lobbying which have been categorized as the third aspect of political marketing in some related studies; and governments, interest group and activists versus international organizations and foreign subjects in IPM. This study further develops a model of IPM, which covers its strategy and marketing mix on the secondary level of the general political marketing model, and then, the third level model of international political choice behaviour based the theory of political choice behaviour in EPM. This paper continues to review the concepts of soft power and public diplomacy and defines their relation with IPM.
• It then reports a case study on the soft power and public diplomacy of the United States from the perspectives of applying IPM and soft power. Under the framework of IPM, it looks at the traditional principles of US foreign policy, that is Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, and the application of US soft power in the Iraq War since 2003. The paper advances the argument that generally all nation states apply IPM to increase their soft power. The decline of US soft power is caused mainly by its foreign policy. The unilateralism Jacksonians and realism Hamiltonians have a historical trend to emphasize hard power while neglecting soft power. Numerous reports and studies have been conducted on the pros and cons of US foreign policy in the Iraq War, which are not the focus of this paper. From the aspect of IPM, this paper studies the case of US soft power and public diplomacy, and their effects in the Iraq War. It attempts to exam the application of US public diplomacy with the key concept of political exchange, political choice behaviour, the long‐term approach and the non‐government operation principles of public diplomacy which is a part of IPM. The case study confirms the relations among IPM, soft power and public diplomacy and finds that lessons can be learned from these practices of IPM. The paper concludes that there is a great demand for research both at a theoretical as well as practical level for IPM and soft power. It calls for further study on this subject.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reigniting the fire: a contemporary research agenda for social,political and nonprofit marketing

The paper reports on the core challenges faced by the nonprofit, political and social marketing disciplinary areas and suggests a series of research agendas to develop theory and practice to meet these challenges.

• Social marketing's research agenda involves the continued adaptation of the new developments in commercial marketing, whilst building a base of social marketing theory and best practice benchmarks that can be used to identify, clarify and classify the boundaries of social marketing against social change techniques.
• Nonprofit marketing is pursuing the dual research agenda of developing the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship whilst seeking deeper consumer‐based research to understand motivations for charitable behaviour and gift giving.
• Political Marketing's research agenda looks for an increase in the level of background research, core data and market research to use as a basis for developing more advanced theoretical and practical models. In addition, as political marketing is being transferred internationally between a range of political and electoral systems, there is a need for comparative research into both the relevance and effectiveness of these techniques to isolate nation independent and nation dependent political marketing strategies and campaigns.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The governance of public affairs

• Government and governance are frequently treated as synonyms. Governing is what governments do in formulating and implementing policies. A burgeoning political science literature uses the term governance in a different way to describe the growing tendency of governments to govern in partnership with a range of non‐state actors and, as a purported consequence, the marginalization of governments within policy‐making processes. Here, some writers go so far as to talk about ‘governance without government’. In a forthcoming book, Rethinking Governance: Bringing the State Back In, Stephen Bell and I argue that this dominant ‘society‐centred’ perspective on governance is flawed. In our view whilst governments are indeed now more likely to forge relationships with a larger range of non‐state actors, they nevertheless remain the central players in governance arrangements. Indeed we argue that governments have been strengthened through the relationships they have developed. This article reviews some of the extant literature on governance and specifies the basic terms of our ‘state‐centric relational’ approach.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Theory and Concept Development in Political Marketing

Abstract

In this article we argue that the state of theory and concept development in political marketing needs to be related to several epistemological as well as topical themes and issues. Seven meta-theoretical issues are discussed with regard to current theoretical position of political marketing research and some initial recommendations are made on how these issues can be developed further. The second part of the article focuses on topical aspects of theory and concept development in political marketing and highlights nine themes for further research. These themes of political marketing are singled out because of their characteristics which show them to be significantly distinct from commercial marketing practice, and therefore need more careful modelling in concepts and theories of political marketing.     

Institutionalizing deliberative democracy

• In the mass democratic polities of today, the role of citizens remains confined largely to that of voting for members of elected legislatures. Beyond that, there is scant opportunity for ‘the public’ to participate in any meaningful sense in most of the tasks that make up the policy‐making process. Indeed, influencing that process is typically viewed as the sole prerogative of technocratic experts, organized interests, and elected officials. This presumption is buttressed (and rationalized) by a too‐ready acceptance of the platitude that citizens are generally uninformed, unskilled, and uninterested in the work of democratic self‐government.
  • We begin with a definition of ‘deliberative democracy’.
  • We then briefly consider its connection to the concept of democracy more generally and argue that the moral authority of the former follows from that of the latter.
  • From both the developing and the developed worlds, we draw several examples of institutionalized deliberative participation. In some, institutionalization has been sustained; in others, it has not been sustained.
  • Reflecting on these examples, we consider the ‘lessons learned’ from these and other cases. We identify costs, difficulties and limitations associated with institutionalizing participatory public deliberation as well as the benefits and advantages thereof.
  • Finally, we briefly outline a proposal for an Australian experiment that might serve as a learning model for subsequent efforts there and elsewhere to ‘institutionalize’ participatory citizen deliberation.
• Institutionalizing deliberative participation would not replace representative government, but rather would supplement it, enabling democratic governments to reflect and respond better to the values, priorities and aspirations of the people they ostensibly serve.
• We offer this practice‐orientated paper as a discussion paper intended to introduce readers to the idea of institutionalizing participatory public deliberation and to generate constructive debate concerning it. We do not presume to provide a rigorous analysis of the concept or of any of the many issues surrounding it.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gamson's Law and voters’ perceptions of portfolio allocation

The assignment of ministerial portfolios to parties is one of the most contested and consequential processes in coalition politics. Accordingly, a great deal of scholarship has investigated how many portfolios different parties obtain in coalition negotiations as well as which parties are assigned which portfolios. However, to our knowledge, no one has ever examined how voters perceive the outcomes of this process – perceptions which must be fundamental to any assessment of policy responsibility in systems with coalition government. This article uses original survey data from four Western European countries to examine voter perceptions of the distribution of cabinet portfolios across parties. In addition to describing the extent to which voters know this distribution, the article also examines whether their perceptions are consistent with a number of different heuristics that voters might use to infer characteristics of the cabinet portfolio distribution. The results suggest that many voters use party role and size heuristics to infer the number of portfolios allocated to different parties as well as an ‘importance rule’, a ‘topical affinity rule’ and a ‘historical regularity rule’ to infer which parties hold which portfolios, but also that a significant number of voters have direct knowledge (not inferred using heuristics) of which parties hold which ministries.