Page 69 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

62 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

goal of politics and politicians is then to try to satisfy the needs and expec-
tations of the people in addition to ensuring their well-being and con-
stantly improving the quality of life.
Democracy is currently the main vehicle that people use to organize
themselves within state structures in the world. Despite being often criti-
cized, this system is spreading across the world and is becoming the final
destination for many societies under authoritarian power (see Huntington,
1991). A fundamental element of democracy is that the legitimization of
state power must arise from collective decisions by the equal members of
the society who are governed by that power. According to a deliberative
conception of democracy, decisions are collective when they arise from
arrangements of binding collective choice that establish conditions of free
public reasoning among equals who are governed by the decisions (Dahl,
2000). In the deliberative conception, then, citizens treat each other as
equals not by giving equal consideration to all interests, but by offering
justifications for the exercise of collective power, framed in terms of con-
siderations that can, roughly speaking, be acknowledged by all as reasons.
Democracy minimally requires that citizens have an opportunity to choose
among rival elites and platforms in regular elections. Competition ensures
that voters are not confined to a single perspective but instead have access
to arguments representing opposing positions. Furthermore, 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. Voters
are not asked to select their preferred candidate from among all eligible
citizens in the country; rather, they must choose between candidates sug-
gested by political parties. As voters learn new information over the course
of the campaign, they are able to make subjectively “better” choices
(Hillygus & Shields, 2008). But voters are not always aware of what the
government is or could be doing, and often they do not know the relation-
ship between government actions and their own utility outcomes (Downs,
1957).
Mutz, Sniderman, and Brody (1996) assert:

Politics, at its core, is about persuasion. It hinges not just on whether
citizens at any one moment in time tend to favor one side of an issue
over another, but on the numbers of them that can be brought, when push
comes to shove, from one side to the other or, indeed, induced to leave
the sidelines in order to take a side. . . . The risk as well as the strength of
democratically contested politics lies precisely in its openness to change.
(p. 1)