ABSTRACT
Margaret Scammell (1999) identifies two strands of political science research which in different ways and to varying extents have provided important input and contributed to the development of the political marketing literature – namely campaign studies and political communications studies. Marketing, she says, is by political scientists here typically treated as a subset of the former. The first comparative studies of election campaigning conducted from Europe started to emerge in the early 1990s (Bowler and Farrell 1992; Butler and Ranney 1992). The starting point of this line of enquiry is electioneering and the central concern is with the particular type of modern campaigning now evident across much of the democratic world in which pollsters, professional consultants and media managers appear to play an increasingly important. The key question is ‘do campaigns matter’ and research efforts typically centre on continuity and change in political behaviour and differences and similarities between examined contexts (Farrell and Schmitt-Beck 2002: 13). Scholars preoccupied with this kind of research have been important contributors to the understanding of contemporary political marketing as practiced by political parties or candidates, but they have at the same time also raised questions about the value of marketing with regard to the theoretical understanding of political campaigns:
A marketing approach does lend a vocabulary to the study of campaigns and helps provide a typology of actions, although sometimes it may seem that marketing language only serves to stress that political campaigns are intent on winning votes. Perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks to the approach is that in general it seems more an exercise in rationalising success or failure in the hindsight rather than being a theoretical tool.
(Bowler and Farrell 1992: 6)