ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines how political direct marketing works, how political interests use it, and its impacts on American politics. He discusses the advantages of the three marketing techniques-mail, phone, and television-and how interest groups use each for specific purposes. The author gives special attention to whether direct marketing, because of its reliance on threat and fear to motivate persons to action, bears responsibility for the increasing political negativism and extremism in American politics. He examines how direct marketing works and how it has changed interest group politics in the United States. Political interests use direct marketing to raise money, recruit new members, lobby public officials, and publicize issues, programs, and candidates. Perhaps the strongest condemnation of direct-marketing technologies and their political outcomes is by political scientist Michael Hayes, who believes that direct marketing creates a "mass society" in which intolerance triumphs and national elites not held accountable by elections manipulate the public and public policy.
