Reconciling marketing with political science: theories of political marketing

This paper has two broad aims: to trace the theoretical development of political marketing and then demonstrate how these concepts can be used in the analysis of election campaigns. Electioneering is not the sole manifestation of marketing in politics but it is the most obvious, a point underlined by recent work addressing the prominent role now played by political marketing in a parliamentary democracy like Britain (Franklin 1994; Kavanagh 1995; Scammell 1995). Whilst much of this material understandably concentrates on the once neglected work of campaign practitioners, the more theoretical explorations of the intersection between marketing and politics have tended to appear in management journals (Shama 1976; Smith and Saunders 1990; Butler and Collins 1994). This paper intends to explore the relationship from a political science perspective.