Page 68 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

CHAPTER FOUR

Persuasion in the Political Context:

Opportunities and Threats

Wojciech Cwalina, Andrzej Falkowski,*
and Bruce I. Newman

In his Politics (1995; c.a. 350 BCE), Aristotle wrote that humans are cre-
ated to live in the political state. Despite the many centuries that have
since passed, this statement is still valid and has inspired many theoreti-
cians and practitioners studying the life of people under many social sys-
tems. However, it has been modified many times in order to stay up to date
with the changing picture of the way humans shape their conditions in
life. In social psychology, the statement was popularized by Aronson
(1992), who coined the notion of humans as social animals. Sociology,
particularly the sociology of politics, treats the individual, to use Lipset’s
(1981) term, as Homo politicus. All these concepts point to the fact that
people may fulfill their goals and desires only when they belong to a group,
namely society. And because they belong to such a group, they must also
obey the rules and standards that prevail there.
Politics may be defined, as proposed by Miller (1987), as a process
whereby a group of people whose opinions or interests are initially diver-
gent reach collective decisions that are generally regarded as binding on
the group and enforced as common policy. Politics presupposes a diversity
of views, if not about ultimate aims, at least about the best means of achiev-
ing them. When people agree spontaneously on a course of action, or
more important, when they are able to reach unanimity simply through
unconstrained discussion, they have no need to engage in politics. The