Our most recent soundings of democratic health reveal a public that is deeply mistrustful of politics and politicians — perhaps more so now than at any time in the past thirty years.
Some of this mistrust is rooted in the broad value shifts that we discussed earlier. A public that is less deferential, less respectful of authority and more skeptical poses a profound challenge to governments. Increasingly, it appears that political parties are attempting to solve these problems not through policy solutions but through better political technology.
The irony here is that this strategy may well be making the problem worse, and steering the nation ever closer to a basic legitimacy crisis.
Since the publication of Theodore White’s The Making of the President in 1961, the connection between marketing and politics has been clear to most people. It seems that each year sees some new political technology or technique raise the stakes in the predator-prey ecology which characterizes modern politics.
Whether it’s the wedge politics and the culture war strategies pursued by Karl Rove and others in the service of George W. Bush, the George Lakoff framing technology that was all the rage a few years ago, the new adaptation of neuroscience to ‘neuropolitics‘, David Plouffe’s methodical review of the use of polling and focus groups in The Audacity to Win and the role played by big data in Obama’s victory, it is clear that something is very different today.
The most recent U.S. presidential campaign cost the parties roughly $11 billion to contest; much of that money was devoted to research and advertising. It would be very interesting to compare the relative dollars spent on political marketing versus policy research over the past generation. My guess is that there has been a dramatic shift in favour of the tools of persuasion and manipulation which may not have served the public interest.
While one can question the value of a political realm immersed in nonstop campaigning to better sell candidates and policies, this new battle mode may have led to abuses through the use of new information technologies in vote suppression, and an expansion of the ethical boundaries of political practice into areas that would have been deemed unthinkable even a decade ago.
In Canada in 2006, the federal government spent roughly the same amount of money on polling as it did on advertising (I declare a major self-interest on this point). Polling for the federal government is non-partisan and designed to solicit the feedback of citizens and clients for government on programs and policies. Government advertising is also supposed to be non-partisan and is intended to explain or communicate.
Cynics suggest that advertising is now more partisan in nature and is designed to persuade and comfort the public. Note, for example, the continuing federal marketing effort on Canada’s Economic Action Plan, which actually concluded its stimulus phase a couple of years ago. Although the numbers are difficult to nail down, it is clear that the federal government now spends somewhere between ten and twenty times as much on advertising as it does on ‘listening to Canadians’.
This dramatic shift from parity of polling and advertising is a fairly minor example of the shift from a focus on policy and engagement to one on persuasion and branding. Policy research has dropped dramatically in the Government of Canada, as Alan Gregg and others have noted.
This is not unique to Canada and the shift from the pursuit of rational public policies to massive investments in political marketing intended to cajole and persuade is our final example of a force we can expect to see bending Canadian politics for the foreseeable future. It is also quite likely the case that the boundaries between the state and the government of the day have become increasingly blurry in this new era.
This massive shift from policy to marketing may not be the cause of the current low level of public trust in government and political parties. Surely it hasn’t helped.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Frank Graves
Some of this mistrust is rooted in the broad value shifts that we discussed earlier. A public that is less deferential, less respectful of authority and more skeptical poses a profound challenge to governments. Increasingly, it appears that political parties are attempting to solve these problems not through policy solutions but through better political technology.
The irony here is that this strategy may well be making the problem worse, and steering the nation ever closer to a basic legitimacy crisis.
Since the publication of Theodore White’s The Making of the President in 1961, the connection between marketing and politics has been clear to most people. It seems that each year sees some new political technology or technique raise the stakes in the predator-prey ecology which characterizes modern politics.
Whether it’s the wedge politics and the culture war strategies pursued by Karl Rove and others in the service of George W. Bush, the George Lakoff framing technology that was all the rage a few years ago, the new adaptation of neuroscience to ‘neuropolitics‘, David Plouffe’s methodical review of the use of polling and focus groups in The Audacity to Win and the role played by big data in Obama’s victory, it is clear that something is very different today.
The most recent U.S. presidential campaign cost the parties roughly $11 billion to contest; much of that money was devoted to research and advertising. It would be very interesting to compare the relative dollars spent on political marketing versus policy research over the past generation. My guess is that there has been a dramatic shift in favour of the tools of persuasion and manipulation which may not have served the public interest.
While one can question the value of a political realm immersed in nonstop campaigning to better sell candidates and policies, this new battle mode may have led to abuses through the use of new information technologies in vote suppression, and an expansion of the ethical boundaries of political practice into areas that would have been deemed unthinkable even a decade ago.
In Canada in 2006, the federal government spent roughly the same amount of money on polling as it did on advertising (I declare a major self-interest on this point). Polling for the federal government is non-partisan and designed to solicit the feedback of citizens and clients for government on programs and policies. Government advertising is also supposed to be non-partisan and is intended to explain or communicate.
Cynics suggest that advertising is now more partisan in nature and is designed to persuade and comfort the public. Note, for example, the continuing federal marketing effort on Canada’s Economic Action Plan, which actually concluded its stimulus phase a couple of years ago. Although the numbers are difficult to nail down, it is clear that the federal government now spends somewhere between ten and twenty times as much on advertising as it does on ‘listening to Canadians’.
This dramatic shift from parity of polling and advertising is a fairly minor example of the shift from a focus on policy and engagement to one on persuasion and branding. Policy research has dropped dramatically in the Government of Canada, as Alan Gregg and others have noted.
This is not unique to Canada and the shift from the pursuit of rational public policies to massive investments in political marketing intended to cajole and persuade is our final example of a force we can expect to see bending Canadian politics for the foreseeable future. It is also quite likely the case that the boundaries between the state and the government of the day have become increasingly blurry in this new era.
This massive shift from policy to marketing may not be the cause of the current low level of public trust in government and political parties. Surely it hasn’t helped.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Frank Graves
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