Alongside Mark Passera, and with some wise counsel from Darren Lilleker, I had the privilege of co-organising the Political Marketing Group’s activities at the UK Political Science Association’s annual conference for 2011. My professional practice and academic background is more associated with political public relations than marketing , but I have increasingly found that the PMG to be the best home for research and networking on strategic communications management in politics.
The first session was titled Public Affairs, Public Relations & Political Marketing. Neil Bendle (University of Western Ontario) presented the first paper that investigated the impact of behavioral economics, and the role of irrationality, on market orientated parties. The application of rational choice in theory building requires assumptions of perfect knowledge on the part of voters , and that voters will always follow a selfish economic rationale in their decision making. Authors often conflate rationality with a lack of errors, which is an impossible standard. Bendle argued that this did not mean that the market orientated model need be abandoned, but rather its needs recasting order to assimilate voters’ social preferences, selflessness and logical inconsistencies.
Mark Passera’s paper in this session also developed a discussion of the role of applying behavioral economics to political marketing. His paper focused on the influence of Thaler and Sunstein’s book Nudge which advocates that governmental communications, in public policy areas such as health and pensions, “nudge” citizens towards making better choices. Again the application of rational choice assumptions were problematised when recognising highly individualised personal motivations, as well as personal emotion response to policy initiatives. The session was completed by Iordanis Kotzaivazoglou (University of Macedonia )and Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki’s (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) longitudinal analysis of gender stereotypes in print advertising during election campaigns in Greece. The paper presented findings from a content analysis of newspaper advertisements placed by parliamentary candidates in five successive election campaigns. The results suggest that within advertising, where the candidate can control their branding, there has been a gradual convergence in gender traits stereotypes and that female candidates are primarily portrayed using male-orientated cues.
The second panel was themed around the impact of electoral systems on political marketing. Kacung Marijan (Airlangga University) presented a study on how the adoption of open list voting has impacted on the marketisation of politics in Indonesia. The change to the voting system has encouraged competition between candidates within parties. Consequently the market for political campaign consultants has expanded as many candidates are beginning to seek their services. Alongside the rise of posters to support individual candidates within the party lists, the costs of campaigning have significantly increased. Wahidah Siregar’s (Sunan Ampel State Institute of Islamic Studies) paper also focused on Indonesia and looked at the relationship between the electoral system and the representation of women in parliament. She explained how the rising costs of electoral campaigning accounted for the high proportion of female candidates coming from a business background. However, the majority of female candidates have yet to secure winnable positions of their party lists. Nigar Degirmenci (Pamukkale University) used the 2010 referendum on constitutional reform in Turkey to explore developments in the personalisation of politics. Degirmenci used critical discourse analysis to analyse the speeches of the main party leaders in Turkey during the campaign. Erdoğan‘s discourses included the deployment of a form of address in Turkish that older siblings use when addressing younger family members. The paper also found that a proportion of people voted less on the constitutional issues at hand, but rather as acts of support, or opposition, to Erdoğan
The third session was titled political marketing and communication. Waraporn Chatratichart (University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce) presented a paper with results from surveys and focus groups into attitudes towards political leaders amongst young people in Thailand. The paper explained how, after the downfall of Thaksin Shinawatra 2006, the personal integrity of a leader became more important from the perspective of young people. However, competency remained significant, so that young people in the study sought a ‘hybrid’ leader who is both honest and competent, what Chatratichart labelled an ‘ethical Thaksin’.
Oliver Escobar (University of Edinburgh) presented his paper on the emotional basis of the international appeal of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Combining auto-ethnography with focus groups and interviews with European voters who were engaged and highly supportive of Obama’s campaign, the study found emotional engagement through a combination of anxiety and enthusiasm. In setting out to interpret Obama’s success it was argued that personal story of Obama intertwined with grander American Dream narratives was significant. Escobar concluded that the campaign succeeded by embedding a multilayered architecture of meanings, in conjunction with the synergetic use of grassroots mobilization and media technologies.
Darren Lilleker (Bournemouth University) presented his paper co-authored with Karolina Koc-Michalska (Science-Po, Paris) on the strategic use by members of the European Parliament (MEPs) of the internet. The paper shared results of a content analysis of the websites of 440 MEPs, with coding categories collecting data on variables relating to personalisation, branding and community building. The majority of sites’ content sought to inform rather than interact. The study also found that the more social communicators were younger, female, MEPs from minor parties, who tended to be elected by more personal voting systems, as opposed to party lists.
Eva Johanna Schweitzer (University of Mainz) also presented findings of a study on political web sites, this time with a focus on Germany. Utilising Resnick’s theories on the “normalisation” of cyberspace – where the internet will replicate the typical deficits and shortcomings found in offline electioneering – the paper used content analysis to evaluate the main party web sites in national elections from 2002 to 2009. The study found that web sites continue to become more professional, with a significant emphasis on top down information and presentation. The results suggested that technological innovations in web 2.0 had exaggerated existing power relations in electoral competition between major and minor actors. Website content continues to contain significant levels of negative content, and despite some elements of personalisation, it was a case of “politics as usual” – and normalisation remains a valid concept.
For the final session of the conference Ieva Dmitričenko (University of Latvia) presented a paper that investigated the balance between western and Russian influences on the development of political campaign practice in Latvia. The study was based on 12 in-depth interviews with campaign practitioners with experience of important roles in at least one election. A key context for Latvia is its status as a post-soviet country, that still has close economic and cultural ties to Russia, and the criticism of what some theorists argue is a model of “guided” or “decorative” democracy that has developed since the end of the Soviet Union. Dmitričenko noted that the USA is considered major exporter of political marketing approaches, but from her research on Latvia it is more accurate to speak about the “globalization” of political campaigning rather that “Americanisation”, because in Latvia the most dominant influence is from the Western Europe and Russia. An interesting aspect of the interviews was the apparent importance of self-study in practitioner education, and the surprising citation by some of the respondents that they used feature films such as Spinning Boris or Wag the Dog as occasional sources of knowledge
Finally, for my own paper, (Scott Davidson, De Montfort University), I explored how a combination of assumptions that utilise rational choice voting theory – and assume a strong market orientation amongst major political parties – has lead many commentators to proclaim the age of grey or senior power. The paper analysed attempts to segment and target older voters in Britain, and concluded that the quality of the segmentation process will be a key determinant in deciding which campaigns successfully build bonds of trust with the ageing electorate. The paper argued that for strategists segmentation by chronological age is crude and unlikely to gain a competitive edge for their candidates. A more intelligent development of age-related voter segments based on variables such as life stage, values, generational identities and media consumption habits is required to achieve significant strategic advantage.
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