ABSTRACT
In Chapters 3 and 4, we focused on strategic approaches to persuading individuals to change their minds, to act on their preferences, or to change their behaviors. In electoral campaigns, whether for candidates or ballot issues, this may well be the single greatest success-critical aspect of a campaign. For in electoral campaigns, organizations and institutionsinterest groups, political parties, media organizations-generally act upon individuals, and it is, collectively, individual behavior that determines the effectiveness of the campaign and, in some measure, the outcome of the election. Similarly, in some campaigns directed against corporations, the effective manipulation of consumer purchasing behavior, as through a
boycott, may have a direct impact. But in many other types of information and infl uence campaigns, the dynamic is actually the reverse. To the extent that they are brought into the campaign at all-and that is not a givenindividuals may, to a greater or lesser extent, act upon organizations, and it is the behavior of those organizations that is potentially determinative. Consumers who may be induced to boycott a merchant, for example, where that merchant is not the actual target of the campaign but is intended to become a pressure point against another company that is one of its suppliers or clients, have at best an indirect effect on the ultimate target. Indeed, they may be entirely unaware of the objectives being served by the pressures they generate. In this chapter, we will turn our attention to the organizational and institutional actors that play more central roles in this broader class of campaigns, and to the strategies that can employ them to advantage. In an election campaign, the objective of the winner is usually to gain control of some agency of power-a government, a corporate board of directors, a membership organization-and to become the decision-maker. But in many other campaigns, the objective is, rather, to infl uence the extant decision-maker(s) without taking control of them, and without taking actual responsibility for their policies and actions. This is at once a narrower objective and a broader one. It is narrower in the sense that the goal is to affect only a small number of specifi c decisions, and perhaps only one. It is broader in the sense that, to accomplish this, the campaigner may fi nd advantage in, or may be forced into, generating pressure from a wide variety of internal and external sources. Together these observations provide our starting point for the present discussion.
