Page 123 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

116 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

cues coming from the mass media, political parties and candidates, and
other people or organizations they trust.
In recent years, politicians have become more and more pragmatic and
sensitive to voters’ needs and the social atmosphere, and they have learned
to put less emphasis on their own political views. It is the voters who de-
cide whether a politician remains on the political stage or whether a new
political star is born. Therefore, new and sophisticated methods of influ-
encing voter behavior are created and used as part of the political market-
ing process (Cwalina et al., 2011; Newman, 1994).
A political marketing model of persuasion, presented in Figure 4.6, is a
proposal that constitutes a merger of political marketing management with
priming and framing effects. The model elaborates on the interrelation-
ships between the particular stages of the political marketing process and
these two persuasion strategies, as well as on the system of mutual de-
pendencies that exists between these strategies.
The key elements of the political communication process include media
content, the influence of political institutions and other political and social
actors on the content of the messages, the specific audience, the interaction
processes between sources of information, and the media disseminating
information. The media agenda is the result of the work of media practi-
tioners (e.g., owners of media corporations, editors, journalists, reporters),
political actors, and events covered by the media (Negrine, 1994). Thus the
relationship between the media and politicians is a bilateral one: politicians
try to include their agenda (i.e., campaign platform) in the media, but to be
successful, they must adapt to the content distributed by the media.
Moreover, the content of a campaign platform is influenced by interest
groups (e.g., lobbyists, labor unions, human rights groups, ecological
movements). The most powerful way in which they exert influence is by
supplying information about a constituent’s case and the issues surround-
ing it on a regular basis to those within the decision process—actual or
potential members of parliaments or governments (see Cwalina et al., 2011;
Hindmoor, 2009).
In a political marketing campaign, message development also refers to
distinguishing between particular groups of voters for whom an individu-
alized and appropriate campaign platform will be designed. Voters have a
set of predispositions (e.g., group attachments, beliefs and attitudes, val-
ues, partisan loyalties, incumbent evaluations), and they are charged with
the task of matching those predispositions with a candidate or party. Voter
segmentation is a process in which all voters are broken down into seg-
ments, or groupings, that the candidate then targets with a specific mes-
sage. From the holistic perspective, the goal of the campaign is to reinforce