Page 76 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 69

whom voters focus on, and it is the leader whose promotion is the main
goal of the campaign.
Party-oriented democracy is characteristic of such countries as Poland,
Finland, the Czech Republic, and Romania, where political parties present
themselves to the voters to choose among. Therefore, in the parliamentary,
presidential, and local elections, candidates supported by significant po-
litical parties have a better chance of success. For example, in Poland, for
a particular candidate to be elected the candidate’s party (or election com-
mittee) must get at least 5 percent of the votes across the whole country,
and if the candidate represents a coalition of various parties, the total must
be at least 8 percent of the votes cast in the whole country. So it may (and
does) happen that a candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency
does not become a member of parliament (MP) because the candidate’s
party did not reach the 5 or 8 percent threshold of votes throughout the
whole country. Obviously party leaders are an important element of win-
ning such support; however, even their personal success does not guaran-
tee the party’s success.
Government-oriented democracy is characteristic of countries such as
Russia, China, and other states where the government is dominated by one
party. According to Zhang (2011), not only has the Chinese Communist
Party-state developed an awareness of the importance of the free market
economy and media as essential components of its governing capacity in
contemporary China, but it has also been able to adopt sophisticated strat-
egies to manage the greatly transformed media for consensus and persua-
sion so as to retain its legitimacy as the sole ruling organization. The
party-state has been constructing hegemony by a mixture of consensus
and coercion. While repressive measures are still part of the recipe for
control, the party-state has also embraced and promoted the various forces
and turned itself into one of the most sophisticated state administrations.
In a government-oriented democracy, political campaigns focus on com-
munication between the government and citizens rather than on direct
competition between candidates or political parties.
Depending on the democracy orientation, then, political campaigns
may focus on different goals and use different means to reach them.
Nevertheless, in all the systems discussed above, political campaigns are
permanent. The permanent campaign is a process of continuing transfor-
mation. It never stops. Therefore, distinguishing the particular stages of
the campaign (pre-campaign period, campaign period, and post-campaign
period) is, in a sense, an artificial procedure because those particular stages
often merge into one another with no clear dividing lines between stages.
Governing then becomes a perpetual campaign that transforms