Relational Political Marketing in Party-Centred Democracies

Because We Deserve It

Helene P.M. Johansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317068310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book offers a critical re-thinking of the way in which traditional market logic - derived from mainstream economics and managerial marketing - has for decades commonly been applied in the theoretical understanding of democratic politics within influential quarters of political science and in later years also the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of political marketing. Such approaches are founded on the assumption that all markets are driven exclusively by exchange dynamics and this has in turn rendered the most basic workings of co-production and participation-oriented party-centred political systems theoretically invisible. The author starts by providing a thorough and wide-ranging critical assessment of the theoretical underpinnings of the contemporary political marketing literature and its market-based political science antecedents. Using a relationship marketing perspective the author goes on to offer a re-conceptualisation of these political spheres in terms of 'markets' which addresses the theoretical inadequacies of prior research. She closes by examining some of the most important practical implications that this alternative approach to party-centred politics may have for the marketing efforts of contemporary membership parties. This book is essential reading to all those interested in party-centred politics and political marketing, as well as democratic theorists and students of political theory in general.

PART I
Conceptual Whys and Contextual Wherefores

Chapter 1
Some Background and an Introduction

Political Marketing – The Phenomenon

The application of marketing thinking and techniques to the conduct of politics has over the last two or three decades been an issue vigorously debated in the media and many academic communities throughout the Western world. At this level ‘political marketing’ is probably best understood as a collective term referring to the emergence and proliferation of a number of interrelated changes in the way in which contemporary Western political candidates, parties and government administrations across the ideological spectrum go about their campaigning activities, the running of their organisations and, in the latter case, also the process of governing (O’Shaughnessy 1990; Kavanagh 1995; Scammell 1995; Nimmo 1999). These ‘new’ practices – most often seen as originating in the US and in Europe initially evident in countries such as the UK, Germany, France and Italy – are now frequently said to be spreading steadily to other parts of the world as well (Plasser, Scheucher et al. 1999).

The phenomenon is often generally described in terms of an increased ‘marketisation’ or ‘professionalisation’ of politics. Observers find that politicians and political parties are growing more reliant on external political consultants – a development frequently viewed as diminishing the importance of volunteers (Sabato 1981; Bennett 1992; Bowler, Donovan et al. 1996). A strengthened focus on image-building, news management and control of the media have put ‘spin-doctors’ or media and communications experts in increasingly influential positions within party- and government administrations (Norris, Curtice et al. 1999; Scammell 2000; Bennett and Entman 2001). The use of traditional market research such as polling and focus group activities have at the same time become a key characteristic of Western politics – both as foundation for the development and conduct of campaigns and as strategic and operational tools in the governing process – a turn of events which has placed ‘marketing experts’ in equally influential positions with regard to policy making (Blumenthal 1980; O’Shaughnessy 1990; Smith and Saunders 1990; Scammell 1995; Nimmo 1999). Correspondingly, political advertising has in many countries (where it is allowed) taken on increased significance as a vehicle of communication with electorates – a development correlated in time with what is reported to be a marked decline in town-meetings, canvassing and other more traditional direct forms of contact with the public (Arterton 1992; Bowler and Farrell 1992; Butler and Ranney 1992). Finally, researchers have observed an increased centralisation of power structures within political parties – a tendency manifesting itself through what is often described as a shift from bottom-up to top-down modes of organisation. A new managerial logic seem to have come into operation in the running of these organisations and measures such as ‘control’, ‘manageability’ and ‘efficiency’ are gaining terrain, some argue, at the expense of local intra-party democracy (Shaw 1994; Kavanagh 2001; Seyd and Whiteley 2002; Fielding 2003).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, debates pertaining to this development have been characterised by polarisation. Critics are at times deeply concerned about the long-term effects such practices could have on democracy. Lack of political leadership and innovation, opportunism, the elevation of form over substance in political communication and the manipulation of electorates, are some of the keywords running through these critiques (O’Shaughnessy 1990; Bennett 1992; Franklin 1995; O’Shaughnessy 2001; Savigny 2006; Henneberg and O’Shaughnessy 2009). Formal political institutions are at the same time seen to have become less able to mobilise the support and engagement of citizens as in the past. Most importantly, scholars are pointing to the decreasing party-memberships and all-time-low voter turnouts currently evident across many advanced industrial nations (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Scarrow 2000; Diamond and Gunther 2001). Trust and confidence in our politicians and political institutions appear to be in equally dramatic decline (Curtice and Jowell 1997; Mortimore 2002). This is a phenomenon described as happening simultaneously throughout the Western world and it is frequently seen as coupled with rising expectations from electors resulting from politicians’ tendency to outbidding each other in the struggle for office (Ashdown 1994). The rise of political marketing is by critics often suggested to represent – if not the only explanation – then certainly a contributing factor to what is perceived as an undesirable development. In short, politics is said to have become reduced to a spectator-sport within de-aligned and increasingly cynical electorates (Cappella and Jamieson 1997), or is seen as ‘packaged’ for media/ market consumption (Franklin 1997; Swanson 1997). The current proliferation of these practices has in some research communities created a pressing concern about the future stability, representativeness and legitimacy of established democratic systems (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995).

There are, however, voices contradicting these rather pessimistic accounts. Protagonists frequently suggest that emerging practices must be seen as part of a ‘natural’ modernisation process of politics in general, and maybe of political parties, in particular. The need for marketing is often, either explicitly or implicitly, perceived as an inevitable and irreversible feature of modern societies – and so too, it seems – of politics (Webb 2000). The development is sometimes also hailed as a movement towards enhancing democracy and political elites’ responsiveness to citizens (Harrop 1990; Lees-Marshment 2001a), and some social scientists – while observing the decline in traditional political engagement – point to altered forms of involvement, including changing notions of what politics is actually about (Giddens 1990; Mulgan 1994; Gibbens and Reimer 1999). Nor is marketing at the forefront of all explanations of the phenomenon. Some political analysts see the development as evidence of an ‘Americanisation of politics’ (Field 1994; Lilleker and Negrine 2003), some focus on the role of the media and argue that what we are seeing is a movement towards increasingly media-driven democracies (Swanson 1997; Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Meyer 2002), and to yet others emerging practices represent political expressions of the postmodern characteristics of contemporary Western societies (Axford and Huggins 2002). Nevertheless, marketing remains an implicit or explicit explanatory keyword in these texts as well – albeit accorded differing degrees of importance in the overall arguments.

Scholarly dissent and debate, notwithstanding, researchers seem largely to agree that contemporary citizens are increasingly encouraged to view themselves as consumers also within the sphere of politics. Debates centre mostly on how this development has come about, how it could most accurately be described and, indeed, whether it should be considered a good or a bad ‘thing’. Elisabeth Cohen (2001: 210, 220), argues that in the US there has been a significant shift from the New Deal’s focus on the responsible ‘citizen consumer’ encouraged to put his/ her purchasing power ‘to the service of some broader social good’, to the post-war free-market ‘customer consumers’ invited to bring a ‘customer mentality to their relations with government, judging state services much like other purchased goods, by the personal benefit they derive from them’. Using the Clinton-Gore administration as an example, she argues that their focus on ‘Putting the Customer First’ was modelled on ‘efficient retail business’, emphasising narrowly defined ‘customer satisfaction’ as the main goal. Matthew Hilton (2001: 241) points to a similar development in Britain, where he says that the government’s 1999 White Paper, Modern Markets: Confident Consumers, ‘redefined citizenship to place consumers “at the heart of policy-making”’.

Political Marketing – A New Field of Academic Enquiry

In the wake of these steadily proliferating political practices, we see the establishment of political marketing as a new academic field. In a seminal article, Margaret Scammell (1999: 718) maps out this development and after pointing to the broadness and international scope of the rapidly expanding literature on electioneering and political communications, she says:

…the last few years have seen the emergence of a coherent subset of the broad field. A group of scholars, based in Britain, Germany and the USA, accepts the label ‘political marketing’ and is attempting to establish it as a distinctive sub discipline, generating regular conferences and a specific literature. It is developing cross-disciplinary political/marketing/communication perspectives not simply to explain the promotional features of modern politics but as a tool of analysis of party and voter behaviour.

Thus, a growing number of scholars – in later years not confined to the abovementioned countries – are attempting to make sense of different political contexts through the use of marketing theory. The antecedents to this type of thinking can be traced a long way back in political science and academic marketing. Within the former discipline, influential studies and theoretical concepts and ideas emerging out of neoclassical economics and social psychology have over the last six decades pointed to and drawn on the similarities between politics and the workings of commercial markets (Lazarsfeld, Berelson et al. 1944; Downs 1957; Kirchheimer 1966; Fiorina 1981; Himmelweit, Humphreys et al. 1981). Similarly, influential marketing scholars early on argued that all organisations in competitive situations should be seen as involved in marketing, irrespective of whether they are operating within commercial or non-commercial spheres (Kotler and Levy 1969; Kotler and Zaltman 1971; Bagozzi 1975). Within the field of contemporary political marketing, we find contributors coming out of both disciplines, and Scammell (1999: 719) goes on to explain:

Political marketing claims to offer new ways of understanding modern politics. It says that ‘political marketing’ is increasingly what democratic parties and candidates do to get elected and that this is different from earlier forms of political salesmanship. It claims that marketing is a specific form of economic rationality that offers insights into the strategic options and behaviour of parties. It shares with history a desire to investigate and explain the behaviour of leading political actors, and thus its focus extends from campaigning into the high politics of government and party management. It shares with political science a desire to understand underlying processes, and therefore to create explanatory models of party and voter behaviour. It shares with political communication the key continuing interest in persuasion. Above all, it claims that political marketing is important. The use of marketing changes the relationships between leaders, parties and voters. It has consequences for democratic practice and citizen engagement. Its influence cannot be confined to the limits of the formal election campaign periods, nor can it be reduced to the details of appearance, packaging and spin doctoring, the common trivia of much media attention. [Emphasis added]

The scope of the new domain is thus seen as broad and all encompassing. Contemporary political marketing scholars attempt to understand the entire sphere of politics as a competitive ‘marketplace’. Much of this work is focused on the analysis of emerging practices and changing political behaviour and remains firmly anchored at a descriptive level (O’Shaughnessy 1990; Franklin 1995; Kavanagh 1995; Scammell 1995; Jamieson 1996), but true to the marketing tradition, a significant part of the literature offers both descriptive conceptualisations and normative strategic theory aimed at practical implementation (Kotler 1981; Mauser 1983; Niffenegger 1989; Newman 1994; Henneberg 1997; Kotler and Kotler 1999; Lees-Marshment 2001a). The field is young, though, and still very much in the process of establishing its own boundaries and terminology.

However, in spite of persistent suggestions (coming particularly from European scholars) that politics more than anything else should be seen as resembling a services industry (Harrop 1990; Henneberg 1997; Scammell 1999; O’Shaughnessy 2001; Baines, Brennan et al. 2003), both analytical and theoretical contributions have from the outset mostly been anchored in the managerial school of marketing or what is often referred to as the marketing mix management paradigm (the MMM-model). This strand of thought is by marketing scholars commonly seen as originating in the reality of the 1950s North American market for ordinary manufactured consumer goods (Grönroos 1994; Payne, Christopher et al. 1995), and it is resting on a view of the ‘nature’ and workings of markets that has much in common with the presuppositions underlying neoclassical economics (Håkanson and Snehota 1989; Bardzil and Johnston 1997)1. Although frequently met with internal criticism, the MMM-model quickly established itself as the dominant strand of thought within academic marketing and has held its position as such for the better part of five decades. The exchange perspective inherent in the framework most importantly presupposes a market situation in which production and consumption are separated in both time and space. It is thus geared to a reality where no consumer participation is considered necessary for the product to come into being. The MMM-model posits a view of marketing as being about the distribution and exchange of prefabricated value or sees it as a function bridging the gap between production and consumption in markets.

Although marketing is often equated with this well-known mainstream consumer framework, the discipline has over the last three decades or so also come to comprise other more ‘industry specific’ strands of thought. Such theoretical frameworks or perspectives have emerged due to a (by many scholars) perceived failure of the MMM-model to explain the basic workings of situations such as services and business-to-business markets. These are most importantly, not typically seen as being about the exchange of prefabricated value alone (Håkanson and Snehota 1989; Christopher, Payne et al. 1991; Gummesson 1999; Grönroos 2000). In many of these market situations production and consumption constitute overlapping (or partially overlapping) processes in which a minimum of customer participation is needed for the service experience to manifest itself or for the industrial good to come into being. In the theoretical description of such situations the focus shifts from exchange and singular transactions (value distribution) to co-production and interaction (value creation). The consumer is conceptualised as a co-creator of value instead of a buyer of prefabricated value and marketing is viewed as an integral part of the production process2. These fundamental differences in the workings of markets have led contemporary marketing scholars to increasingly acknowledge the theoretical limitations of a narrowly defined exchange perspective outside its original habitat of traditional manufactured goods markets (Sheth and Parvatiyar 1995). Scholarly attraction to a generic concept of marketing has consequently paled considerably over the last two or three decades and the crucial disciplinary keyword has instead come to be ‘context’ (Sheth and Sisodia 1999: 84). The choice of marketing framework is thus something that an increasing number of scholars say should be determined by and appropriated for the ‘nature’ and requirements of the specific industry or market which it aims at describing, or to which it would subsequently be applied in practice (O’Malley and Tynan 1999; Strauss 2005).

It has however taken some time for these insights to move to mainstream marketing (Grönroos 1994; Gummesson 1999; Baker 2002), and perhaps consequently also to travel into contemporary political analysis and theorising. Mostly relying on the MMM-model, contemporary political marketing scholars preoccupied with the development of concepts or theory (see e.g., Lees-Marshment 2001a; Wring 2002), seem currently to be struggling with theoretical challenges which are traceable to conceptual misfits between the choice of marketing framework and the systemic ‘nature’ of some of the contexts in which the framework is applied. In the search for theoretical ‘tools’ with which to improve our understanding of politics, the political marketing research community appears to be going down a generic path of thought quite similar to that which has long been seriously criticised and which may now perhaps be seen as being in the slow process of abandonment within the marketing discipline itself (Gordon 1998; Gummesson 1999; Grönroos 2000; Kotler 2001; Baker 2002; Christopher, Payne et al. 2002; Levy 2002; Piercy 2002). Not only do theoretical and conceptual endeavours sometimes rest on naïve or overly enthusiastic equations of political and commercial contexts (Lock and Harris 1996; Henneberg and O’Shaughnessy 2007), there appears to be a pursuit of concepts that could simultaneously explain the dynamics of ‘political markets’ as distinctly different as the candidate-centred US and party-centred systems based on the workings of strong membership parties. This striving for cross-contextual validity or relevance is an ambition which the contemporary political marketing literature shares with traditional economic approaches to politics, and a pronounced example of it on behalf of the new domain can be found in Stephan Henneberg’s (2002: 94) following statement:

…political marketing has international implications: it is not an isolated phenomenon but occurs with differing intensity in all democratic countries… Therefore, a concept of political marketing must include candidate-centred as well as party-centred systems in any existing form. [Emphasis added]

This book rests on a critical questioning of the general helpfulness of such a generic way of theorising democratic politics. It focuses on the way in which theory – building on a simplified view of markets and to a great extent emanating from the US – has for decades also commonly been applied in the conceptualisation and analysis of party-centred political systems. It looks into how this dominance has at a theoretical level clouded over fundamental systemic differences, rendered important parts of the political process within the latter contexts theoretically invisible and resulted in significant misrepresentations of how thes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I CONCEPTUAL WHYS AND CONTEXTUAL WHEREFORES
• PART II UNDERSTANDING MARKETS AND MARKETING – TWO IMPORTANT FRAMEWORKS
• PART III POLITICAL MARKETING – THEORISING POLITICS AS ‘MARKETS’
• Bibliography
• Index