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Persuasion in the Political Context 67

regarded as part of an external macrostructure and understood in a broad
social, political, legal, economic, and technological context, forming and
controlling the political behavior of individuals and institutions. However,
such an approach toward marketing can also perform a heuristic function:
it is the source of new ideas and an innovative approach to explaining the
existing political behaviors, as well as predicting those which might ap-
pear in the more or less remote future. In this context, marketing manage-
ment functions as a lens through which a given persuasion strategy is
planned and implemented.
The advanced model of political marketing proposed by Cwalina and
colleagues (2011) and presented in Figure 4.1 following constitutes a pro-
posal to explain the specificity of marketing activities in politics.
The advanced model of political marketing integrates the permanent
marketing campaign and the political marketing process into a single
framework. These two components are realized within a particular coun-
try’s political system. The system depends, above all, on political tradition
as well as on the efficiency of the developed democratic procedures. In this
way, “democracy orientation” determines how the functions of the author-
ities are implemented and who is the dominant object in the government
structure. However, democracy orientation also defines whom the voters
focus on during elections. From this perspective, one can distinguish four
fundamental types of such orientation: candidate-oriented democracy,
party leader–oriented democracy, party-oriented democracy, and govern-
ment-oriented democracy. An example of candidate-oriented democracy is
the United States, where the choice in an election is very much a function
of the sophisticated use of marketing tools to move a person into conten-
tion. It is characterized by the electorate’s attention shifts from political
parties to specific candidates running for various offices and, particularly,
for the presidency (Newman, 1999b; Wattenberg, 1991). Although the
national party committees play a supportive role, candidate image, charac-
ter, and policy pledges are the core “products” offered in elections rather
than party behaviors and platforms.
Party leader–oriented democracy is characteristic of the United Kingdom
and Mexico, where the focus is still on the individual in the campaign, but
the choice in an election is more a function of the “approval” of a super-
body of influentials who decide who will run in an election. As Stevens
and Karp (2012) stated, in British politics the leaders are increasingly the
personification of their parties. In this context it seems justifiable to as-
sume that a political party and the voters’ identification with it are impor-
tant factors influencing voting decisions. However, the party’s image is to
a large degree dependent on how its leader is perceived. It is the leader