Page 131 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

resonance in the minds of the voters. Thus, Ronald Reagan
comes to stand for the reassertion of traditional American
values; Bill Clinton for ‘change’ in 1992 and ‘continuity’ in 1996.
Dick Morris’s account of the Clinton re-election campaign
shows how the president, with the help of sophisticated political
marketing, shrewdly positioned himself between left and right,
adopting a strategy of ‘triangulation’ (1997). This meant, as
already noted, taking the most popular themes and policies
from the Democrats on the one hand (a strong welfare
programme, for example), and the Republicans on the other
(strong on law and order, welfare to work).

POLITICAL ADVERTISING IN
THE UNITED KINGDOM

Political advertising, as noted at the beginning of this chapter,
was pioneered in the US and has reached its highest level of
sophistication there. But the techniques, styles and formats
described above have been exported to other liberal democracies
in which the media play an equally central cultural role. In the
UK, as already noted, paid political advertising on television is
prohibited (though not advertising in the press, the cinema or on
billboards). As the Independent Television Commission’s Code
of Practice puts it, ‘no commercial made by a body of a political
nature is allowed, or an ad directed at a political end, or one
related to an industrial dispute, or one which shows partiality
in political or industrial controversy, or which relates to current
public policy’.
But ‘party political broadcasts’ can easily be viewed as adver-
tising, given that, in them, ‘the source controls the message’ (Johnson
and Elebash, 1986, p. 303) and that, increasingly, professional
advertising and marketing agencies are employed by the parties to
make them.
As was the case in America, British political advertising predates
broadcasting, with parties utilising print and other media to
disseminate campaign messages from the nineteenth century. As in
the US, it emerged as a major element of the political process
only with the spread of television as a mass medium in the 1950s.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, professional advertising and marketing
techniques were first adopted in Britain by the party of capitalism,
the Conservatives. For reasons which we shall examine later (see

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