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Political marketing
Edited by Phil Harris and Andrew Lock [University of Chester and University of Leeds]
In the last 20 years political marketing has moved from being the relatively obscure concern of a small group of academic marketers who were also interested in politics, to a significant area of international research in contemporary marketing. High quality research is now being published regularly on all aspects of political marketing whether it is related to the different political environments of the USA, Europe, Asia or Australasia or the political processes involved with international bodies such as the WTO. There has been an increasingly active dialogue between academics and practitioners which have contributed to both theory, the practice of political marketing and associated processes such as lobbying, and approaches to regulation in these areas. It has also gained the acknowledgement from political scientists that political marketing has something to offer beyond the black arts of propaganda! Since the first special issue on this area in the EJM that we edited, there has been a huge growth in both the quality and volume of work in this area, reflected in the number of submissions that we received for this special issue. This led to some very difficult decisions about what research to include, there being so many really good papers to choose from. To plug gaps in theory development we have deliberately selected empirical work linked to construct development, and also given preference to international coverage crossing cultures and voting systems, plus the insightful work on young people and young Moslems in particular.
While one can see evidence of political marketing from the earliest days of political activity, the origins of it as field of study, albeit highly practice-related, are to be found in work of early authors such as [7] Kelley (1956) who first defined the term to refer to this domain of activity. The subject's development was strongly aided by [13] Rothschild's (1978) work on political advertising effectiveness and segmentation and also his later work extending this to social policy and political policy making. These early foundations of political marketing research were strengthened by the growing professionalism of campaign management, particularly in the USA, the rise of television in the second half of the last century and...