Page 72 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 65

behavior (Newman, 1994, 1999a). In political marketing, marketing tech-
niques are used to shape voters’ attitudes in order to make them support a
given candidate or political party. Therefore, new and sophisticated meth-
ods of influencing voter behavior are created, which are often based on
psychological knowledge and principles. The results from psychological
research on evoking emotions and creating perceptions of objects are com-
monly used to construct persuasion messages employed in political cam-
paigns. Such methods are based on manipulating people’s attitudes and
preferences beyond their conscious control, on the “automatic” level.
Often voters do not realize that their behavior is formed by those who
purposefully use complex marketing technology.
This chapter consists of three sections. The first focuses on showing
political marketing as the processes of exchanges and establishing, main-
taining, and enhancing relationships among objects in the political mar-
ket, which largely depend on planning and implementing particular
advanced persuasion strategies. This section discusses macro and micro
perspectives on political marketing, in the context of which marketing
management is a kind of “lens” through which politicians try to win voters’
support during electoral campaigns, as well as approval for their jobs
when they are in office.
Generally the persuasion strategies used in political marketing rely on
two main methods of influencing citizens: priming and framing. The sec-
ond section of the chapter presents the psychological mechanisms that
underlie priming effects and then proceeds to discuss their pragmatic out-
comes in shaping opinions on political issues and evaluations of political
leaders and parties. Presented here are the phenomena of media and can-
didate priming, along with the interrelations between them in the process
of creating political messages. Also discussed are the specificity and conse-
quences of priming, which concentrates on shaping citizens’ judgments
concerning politicians by focusing on particular political issues (issue
priming) or on personality traits of the politicians (image priming). This
section ends by pointing out the boundary conditions of priming
strategies.
The third section presents the second main persuasive strategy used for
influencing voters’ opinions, attitudes, and behavior: framing. The section
expounds the psychological grounds of framing effects—cognitive and
affective—with special emphasis on prospect theory and its application to
the political realm. It also underscores the increased effectiveness of fram-
ing when applied to the strategic segment of the electoral market—the
undecided voters. Also presented in this context is the strategy to employ
ambiguity in political communication as a specific type of framing. This