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During the past two decades, the movement toward eGoverment has shifted many government services online. Despite initial hopes that the Internet could be leveraged to increase voter participation, eGovernment has changed little about the voting process. Our field experiment compares two treatments sent to voters via postal mail prior to the 2010 general election in Maine: (1) recruitment to request a mail ballot via Maine's new online system and (2) recruitment to request a mail ballot using Maine's traditional paper application. We find that recruitment to vote by mail using a traditional paper ballot application significantly increased turnout. Contrary to the expectations of advocates of eGovernment, the mailer encouraging voters to use Maine's innovative new online ballot request system generated no significant increase in overall voter turnout. Our findings indicate why eGovernment continues to contribute less to democratic participation than anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of political marketing's theoretical tenets is the translation of commercial advertising techniques to politics. This paper focuses on celebrity endorsement as a commercial technique which is translated into political campaigning. Celebrity endorsement relates directly to celebrity politics, that is, the result of celebrity culture getting in touch with politics, as a way of revitalizing the offering of parties and candidates. In this context, our study analyzes the representation and use of celebrity politicians in Spain by the conservative Popular Party (PP) during the April 2019 national election. In order to shed light on the way celebrities were used in the PP's social media campaign, we content-analyze 1,117 Twitter messages taken from the party's profile, as well as conservative presidential candidate Pablo Casado's profile. Analytical variables include frequency of mentions, the strategic axis (rational/emotional) with which celebrities were depicted, the features which were highlighted, and the type of endorsement performed by the celebrities. Message topics and functions were also added to the analysis. Results indicate a weak and flawed strategic use of celebrities, who were scarcely mentioned, and depicted in a non-innovative, traditional fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, celebrity populism has become increasingly prevalent in politics worldwide. However, the relationship between populism and celebrity politics is not straightforward, and more research is needed to understand how these two concepts intersect. The authors of this paper argue that a more nuanced understanding of celebrity populism is necessary to identify and analyze its various forms. By analyzing the communication strategies of the three populist candidates in the 2019–2020 Croatian presidential election, this paper empirically investigates how celebrity populism manifests in practice. The authors use their proposed conceptualization to classify the candidates based on their use of populist and celebrity strategies. This allows for a more granular understanding of the different ways in which celebrity and populism can be combined in politics. The findings suggest that celebrity populism can take on different forms depending on the specific context and characteristics of the candidates. Moreover, the authors argue that celebrity populism is a strategy that can be effective in gaining popularity and mobilizing voters, particularly in countries where trust in political institutions is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine whether opposition parties, particularly the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), can promote transition in the electoral authoritarian regime in Russia. We use the example of the National Action Party's (PAN) evolution as an "official opposition" party in Mexico and discuss how its campaign strategy and party identity evolved. Using a framework derived from the political marketing literature on party branding and rebranding, we argue that the PAN successfully rebranded itself via the electoral opportunities afforded by structure of Mexican federalism, which ultimately led to the democratic transition in 1999. We then address the possibility of a similar evolution occurring in Russia, by examining how the CPRF altered its national campaign message between 2015–2018. Finally, we speculate whether local opposition victories will spark the kind of transition in Russia that occurred in other electoral authoritarian regimes, such as Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Mugabe's dominance in Zimbabwean politics post-independence has led critics to argue that politics in Zimbabwe is personal and patriarchal. Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF)'s alleged use of violence, violent discourse, and other unorthodox power retention strategies have been used to justify claims that Zimbabwean politics is the politics of chaos. In this post-colonial (mis)reading of African politics, ZANU PF and Mugabe discourses have been labeled nativism, patriotic history, Mugabeism, grotesque nationalism, etc. However, these studies have either been uncritically pro- or anti-ZANU PF (Moore 2012). The paper, through an analysis of ZANU PF's rebranding of Mugabe in the July 2013 elections, suggests a new multitheoretical approach to overcome this uncritical reading of Zimbabwe's political branding practices. The suggested approach utilizes insights gleaned from sign theory, political branding and/or advertising theory, post-colonial theory, and decolonial theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a 38-item nine dimensional statistically valid structural model of political mix for a developing country. The methodological approach of the study is based on 2357 primary data collected from rural and urban voters in Bangladesh. Results of the paper revealed significant differences in priorities between the two voter groups on political mix items. In one hand, rural voters were found to prefer candidates promoted by celebrities and national leaders, were swayed by public opinion, and even influenced by the sight of large sculptures of party symbols or effigies of the candidates in the campaign trail. On the other hand, urban voters were found to take into account the candidates' modesty, their powers of articulation, as well as the economic and psychological cost of the candidates' victory while making the electoral decision. The study recommends utilizing voter information systems to identify and nominate candidates as well as use party chairperson and national icons for word of mouth promotion and concludes by suggesting areas for further research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do you create and build a personal political brand? Personal branding can enable individuals to self-commodify and formulate distinct identities created from both tangible and intangible characteristics. However, there is little insight into how individuals create and manage their personal brand identities. This paper contributes to this lacuna in the literature and focusses on personal political branding. Contextualized in the British Crown Dependence of Guernsey; the island community has no political parties and Parliamentarians [deputies] stand as independent candidates. Deputies construct their own personal brand with the aim of resonating with their constituents often with limited resources and without the 'political machine' found in party-systems. Therefore, this study examines the deputies' strategies to create, build and communicate their brands in a nonparty system. Findings indicate that Guernsey's politicians created their desired identities around key components including legacy, heritage and experience, personality characteristics opposed to focused policies, personal values and acknowledged that brand building was a continuous process of maintaining presence, and communicating personal aspirations. Therefore, Guernsey's politicians formulated their personal political brand identities without the mechanisms of a party system. This paper extends the personal branding literature demonstrating the challenging process of formulating and managing personal political brands in a competitive environment and presents a Personal Brand Identity framework, a strategic tool to evaluate and refine desired identities within and beyond the setting of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first publication of the conceptual model of political market orientation model has been used empirically to understand the behavior and attitudes of political party members towards stakeholders in various contexts. The results have provided only limited support for the constructs that represent orientations towards the various stakeholder groups. This has led to an evolution in the conceptualization of the stakeholders that are included in the PMO model across existing literature with the aim of addressing this problem; whilst the inclusion of voters, party members and competing parties have received a degree of support across empirical investigations, it has proved difficult to usefully conceptualize other stakeholder groups. The research aim of this paper is to integrate recent advances in the theoretical foundations of political marketing with conceptual model of PMO in order to propose a revised conceptualization of a political stakeholder orientation. This aim is motivated by a need to further develop the conceptual foundations of the political marketing research field. This paper discusses recent research into the nature of stakeholders in the political marketing context and of the nature of the political exchange of value as a series of three, linked interactions. We subsequently present and critique the stakeholder orientation constructs of the PMO model. Finally, we demonstrate how these recent advances in the political marketing literature necessitate the development of the PMO concept into a broader PSO concept, based on a stakeholder perspective on political marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on an under-researched and under-developed typology of political branding and conceptualizes politicians as personal political brands. Further, this study answers explicit calls for more research devoted to exploring the development of intended brand identity particularly from a brand creator perspective. Members of Parliament from the Republic of Iceland contextualizes this study. This qualitative case-study approach reveals how personal political brands create, construct and communicate their identity. Personal political brand identities were established and managed via a clear brand mantra and offline-online communication tools, which in turn revealed a degree of alignment with their party-political brand. However, this paper also demonstrates the challenges of managing the identities of personal political brands in terms of authenticity and integration particularly with coalition partners. Our paper builds on the six-staged analytical process of personal branding and proposes the Personal Political Brand Identity Appraisal Framework as an operational tool to introspectively evaluate personal political brand identity. This framework can be used by political actors across different settings and contexts to assess personal political brands from multiple perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its important practical implications, there has been a growing number of studies on framing conducted by scholars from various research domains. There has been, however, no paper that would provide a comprehensive overview of various moderators and mediators of the effect. The aim of this paper is to address this research gap, concentrating on psychological moderators and mediators of framing characteristic for political marketing. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, the concepts of framing, priming and agenda-setting as well as the similarities and differences between them are presented in order to resolve common terminological inconsistencies. In the second, we discuss the moderating role of such variables as knowledge, trust in media and values on framing effect. In the third section, psychological mechanisms that underlie framing and priming are reviewed. Here, cognitive mediators such as accessibility and applicability effects are presented, followed by the discussion of the moderating and mediating role of emotions in framing effects, with special attention given to positive-negative asymmetry observed in the evaluation of political candidates and events. Finally, implication for political brand management are discussed. Our findings can be relevant for politicians, specialists dealing in political brand image and scholars studying framing effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter offers politicians a direct path of communication to the public, and by its very nature, encourages tweets that are often heavy on emotions. Given the rise of Twitter and emotional appeals in politics, this paper investigates two important questions: How "emotional" are political candidates on Twitter, and, how does the public respond to candidates' tweets containing emotional appeals such as joy, fear, anger, and disgust? Based on Crimson Hexagon's sentiment analysis of over 500,000 tweets for 541 members of the 115th Congress and the public's corresponding replies, we find that the tone of candidates' tweets and the public's reactions is primarily positive. We also find congruence in the emotions between a political tweet and its reply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I outline a method for collecting Twitter data to identify two types of political actors that are increasingly prominent in social media environments: influential politicians and politicized influencers. Influential politicians are those whose messages are readily retweeted (i.e., shared) while politicized influencers are users who retweet politicians' messages and who themselves receive many retweets. I find that highly retweeted politicized influencers tend not to have formal political affiliations, and so are politically influential but not in an official political capacity. I then relate the Twitter data to electoral outcomes of the 2016 US congressional races. I find that, for richer candidates and incumbents, receiving many retweets is associated with higher vote percentages while, for poorer candidates and challengers, receiving retweets from highly retweeted users is associated with higher vote percentages. Better-off candidates should thus strive to be influential politicians, whereas worse-off candidates should aim to get retweeted by influential users. I argue that the rise of social media begs for a study of what we might call influencer politics, which allows for new empirical investigations into the role that social media play in shaping the democratic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses cognitive mapping techniques to understand how brand associations, an important aspect of political brand equity are formed, differ, and change, from the perspective of citizens, across the four largest Irish political parties between 2013 and 2016. The paper focuses in particular upon the strength, favourability and uniqueness of these brand associations. The results constitute a first attempt to longitudinally explore changing political brand associations through cognitive mapping techniques, using data generated with the participation of hundreds of citizens. Our findings suggest that this approach can contribute to our understanding of how and why political brand associations change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And this might be the long-awaited opportunity for "traditional parties" to restore their credit among voters (or open the political market to new political parties). Looking at the development of the party system in CEE countries (or of Europe in general) over the last 10-15 years, we see several examples of new parties that are very often labeled populist, entrepreneurial, or both (Hlousek, Kopecek, and Vodová [10]). The subject of their research is political advertising on Facebook, which is supposed to represent a channel through which opposition parties can communicate with their audiences in a country where mainstream communication channels are either formerly controlled or informally influenced by the governing party. If the level of trust in government or political parties drops, voters sooner or later desire new parties. [Extracted from the article]

The rise of negative partisanship raises the possibility that perceptions of what the partisan out-group believes on a factual matter could serve as a cue for one's own factual beliefs. In the current paper, we present the results of an online experiment using a sample of self-identified conservatives and liberals on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Across several statements on various political issues, participants were randomly assigned to receive a corrective message, polling information about the factual beliefs of members from the partisan out-group, or both. We find that while the corrective message improved belief accuracy, information about the out-group did not influence belief accuracy either directly or by moderating the influence of corrections – even among those with the strongest antipathy toward the out-party. We discuss the implications of the results for the role of negative partisanship for misinformation and corrective messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the key challenges of social media use by politicians in relation to political relationship marketing. Utilising a case study of the online footprint left by Welsh politicians and their attitude towards social media based on three business based rationales - engagement, level of control, and return on investment - the paper offers an expanded conception of the perceptions and fears influencing the use of social media by politicians in terms of political relationship marketing. The article concludes with some critical thoughts regarding the understanding of relationship marketing principles by politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how political marketing as a practice and theory works and if it can be applied in a social and political environment of broken trust. The topic is usually the opposite; that is, if political marketing acts as an accelerator for undemocratic sentiments and as a cruel, soul-less instrument that breaks the trust in democratic societies. But here we look at how political marketing and its fundamental concept of “exchange” work when the general climate is one of political and social discontents. The starting point of the research is a simple observation that during 23 years of post-1989 Romanian democracy the parties and coalitions winning the elections have very often collapsed or got into large scandals very soon after the election moment; it is also the case for opposition parties losing elections. The paper is asking whether the cvasi-permanent political “conflict” is not in fact a denial of a consumer-oriented political marketing approach. The paper follows participation, election, and polling results as indicators and outputs of both political trust and political marketing processes. A strong emphasis will be put on the electoral system background which is the foundation for political marketing strategies. The consumer approach of candidates and parties will be examined from macrodata and analysis of how electoral campaigns were put in place in previous years. This is not a paper on ethics. It is an instrumental and practical exploration of the relation between social and democratic trust on one side and political marketing as a discipline and practice on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sophistication of political campaigns has dramatically increased over recent election cycles through the embracing of big data analytics. Collecting and storing information on actual and potential voters, volunteers, and donors has produced extensive databases that are then used to guide microtargeting efforts related to advertising, organizing, and fundraising efforts. But building, maintaining, and analyzing this data are costly in itself. This paper looks at two aspects of data-driven political fundraising: precision and selectiveness, with respect to the alignment of the ideology of potential donors and the ideology of the candidate. Specifically, the proposed model is used to determine the optimal precision in estimating a donor's location on the political ideology spectrum and the optimal targeting decision for fundraising solicitations given that estimate. Analysis of the model produces guidance for changes in solicitation cost and donation size. The results produced by the model are considered in light of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The analysis suggests that the Clinton campaign's larger donation size likely played a greater role than did the campaign's higher solicitation cost in terms of targeting. The model is also consistent with the Clinton campaign's higher expenditures on analytics, given their larger donation size and solicitation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of today's voters and political candidates demographic characteristics calls for the application of the homophily principle in understanding voters behavior. This paper evaluated the effect of ethnic, gender, religious and age homophily on status homophily, which is contextualized within the Ghanaian context. The findings established that amongst the factors affecting status homophily; ethnic homophily is the most influential factor, followed by gender homophily and age homophily, with religious homophily having the least effect. The findings established that voter preference for candidates during elections draws on ethnic lines and dissipate the established perception that religion is a major influential factor in voter preference for candidates. Taken together, this work highlights the importance of status homophily in political marketing research and practice and the opportunities for future research. It recommended that political marketers should develop and apply market orientation, marketing intelligence and demographic segmentation as well as develop positioning strategies using political brand personalities and brand ambassadors based on voters' demographic preferences for candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web allows political parties to segment and microtarget specific groups of voters. This paper seeks to measure voter targeting online focusing on catch-all parties and client parties' websites during the 2008 and 2013 Austrian general elections and the 2009 and 2013 German federal elections. Thereby, this comparative longitudinal analysis also aims to provide insights into the development process of political targeting strategies. From a theoretical perspective, catch-all parties try to appeal to a diverse spectrum of potential voters, whereas client parties are aiming at a more specific type of voter. The results of the content analysis show that (a) information and services on parties' websites increasingly focus on addressing the general public and (b) differences between catch-all and client parties have been reduced between campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New currencies designed for user anonymity and privacy – widely referred to as "privacy coins" – have forced governments to listen and legislate, but the political motivations of these currencies are not well understood. Following the growing interest of political brands in different contexts, we provide the first systematic review of political motivations expressed in cryptocurrency whitepapers whose explicit goal is "privacy." Many privacy coins deliberately position themselves as alternative political brands. Although cryptocurrencies are often closely associated with political philosophies that aim to diminish or subvert the power of governments and banks, advocates of privacy occupy much broader ideological ground. We present thematic trends within the privacy coin literature and identify epistemic and ethical tensions present within the communities of people calling for the adoption of entirely private currencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political branding has developed into an established and vibrant sub-discipline of political marketing. Indeed, political branding research continues to push boundaries by critically applying consumer based branding theories, concepts and frameworks to the political environment. Recently, political branding scholars have segmented research into different categories such as corporate, candidate, leader, local-regional, internal or external in orientation. Despite this development, there continues to be limited research on alternative or different typologies of political brands. This study reaffirms political branding as a distinct area of research and discusses how political brands can be conceptualised and operationalised. Further, drawing on seven empirical and conceptual papers, which focus on different typologies of political brands from a range of international contexts including Canada, USA, Iceland, Indonesia and India, we reflect on the current political branding environment. We conclude that there are multiple relationships and numerous interconnected political brands, which represent an intricate environment or ecosystem. This study offers academics and political actors guidance on how to conceptualise political brands and provides a starting point to map out the ecosystems of political brands. Finally, this study provides explicit calls for further research in political branding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns how publics perceive and relate to a foreign politician. There is no formal relationship between these groups as the publics have no ability to participate in national elections that could validate or detract the aura of legitimacy of the politician. Therefore the relationship could be more informal in nature and based upon perceived similarities and differences of held norms and values. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is a well-known (high profile) global political figure, which may mean a more intensely generated set of attitudes toward him as a political figure. There has been an overwhelmingly negative flow of information in mainstream mass media, especially after the Ukraine crisis. The question posed in the paper sets out to answer, given the negative coverage and associations, could any foreign (non-Russian) publics still like or admire him? The answer found is yes, there are in fact diverse sets of foreign publics like or admire his actual/perceived values and norms – for example his conservative values or his conflict with the US-led West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from the analyses of political party web pages during the 2009 European Parliament elections in Estonia. It examines the presence and absence of web 2.0 features on the sites and aims to find out whether interactivity-based applications are used by parties to increase participation and to foster deliberative politics. Estonia as a small ex-Soviet country has emerged after the Soviet Union collapse as one of the most advanced e-societies in the world. Therefore, Estonia is chosen as a case study to explore whether and how decision makers use web 2.0 elements for fostering Habermasian dialogue between the citizens and the power holders in the society where technical obstacles for deliberative politics do not exist any longer. The results show that the Estonian parties still focus on the one-sided or top-down model of communication, based on web 1.0 features, even though all conditions for deliberation from the technical and infrastructural side in Estonia are fulfilled. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible reasons parties might not be interested in using web 2.0 elements in their web campaign and how it might be linked to the conditions where citizens’ participation and interest in politics is low. There is also emphasis on the need for further systematic comparative research in order to draw conclusions on the changes in the online campaigning and political communication process in the era of cyber-democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue presented at the 'Budapest Political Communication Forum', on topics including voter behavior, Russia and information warfare and crisis management by Polish government.

The 2016 general election presented an unusual challenge to Republican congressional candidates: whether to market one's campaign as aligned with or against Donald Trump's controversial candidacy. In this paper, we determine what district and member-level factors influence candidate endorsements of Trump for president. Second, we study if the endorsements hurt candidates on Election Day. We find that underlying political partisanship, as measured by Mitt Romney's 2012 vote share in congressional districts, predicts much of incumbents' support for Trump, and that candidates' support did not harm them in the general election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an insider perspective of United States Congressional campaigning by exploring political marketing on the web. We offer theoretical frameworks that predict how campaigns view their websites (e.g., perceptions of likely audiences), how campaigns use their websites (e.g., content posted), and how these views and usages have evolved (or not) over time. We test our predictions with a unique data set from surveys of political marketers involved with the creation and maintenance of congressional campaign websites between 2008 and 2014. Consistent with our expectations, we find uniform views across campaigns about perceived website users (e.g., engaged voters). However, we also find support for our expectation of fundamental differences—between incumbent and non-incumbent campaigns—in what is posted on campaign websites. We also find some, but not many, changes in website usage over time. We conclude that differential marketing motivations result in campaigns that depart from the normative ideal of engaged dialogues that facilitate representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand positions of five English political parties are analyzed using Aaker's brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analyzed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties’ brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating competence and communicating sincerity and between communicating sophistication and communicating ruggedness. We find that parties’ brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green Party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker's existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choice of political party is an important decision a citizen faces in a democracy. In recent times, as democracies in many countries have matured, a number of studies are focusing on party and candidate choice and their various determinants. India, being the largest democracy, provides a fertile ground for such research. Accordingly, in this paper we concentrate on demographic characteristics, newspaper-reading habits of voters, and their political choice. To study this we have considered a very unique data set collected just before the watershed elections in the state of West Bengal in India, where the ruling Communist coalition was defeated after thirty-four years of power in the state. The survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire to collect information on demographic characteristics of voters and their political choice. The respondents were asked to indicate their party choice from among the three major political parties. As the literature shows that gender, age, education, income levels, marital status, occupational status, and choice of newspaper have significant impact on political choice, we have considered these as predictor variables for our study. From our study it is seen that among the demographic determinants, gender, marital status, and income of the respondents do not influence the choice of political party in our sample. However, occupation and newspaper choice of voters have significant impact on political party choice in our sample. In addition, we have observed that certain categories of age of voters significantly influence decision making of voters along with occupation and newspaper choice categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Arab world has experienced some unprecedented social movements, labeled by the media as the Arab Spring. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of public policy, advertising, media, and public spheres on the Arab Spring. The media and economic policies enacted in the Arab world in the 1990s played a significant role in changing consumer culture in the Arab region, resulting in significant changes in public policy. Two studies were conducted to test how the change in consumer culture along with new public polices in the region contributed to the uprisings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political communication scholars who study the persuasive effects of political advertising often assume that the relationship between advertising volume and vote choice is linear. Even though the product advertising literature has long recognized that advertising has both "wear in" and "wear out" effects, few political communication scholars consider this possibility. This study explains why it is both normatively and empirically important to determine the precise relationship between advertising and vote choice. We then use data from two published studies to investigate inductively how persuasion effects vary with different television advertising levels. The findings suggest that political advertisements do indeed have both "wear-in" and "wear-out" effects. We conclude by investigating three ways to model advertising effects in a more parsimonious manner and settle on log transforming the measure of advertising as the preferred method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research attempts to develop the reformist dimensions based on the case of successful political outsiders. Literature suggest that reformers are those perceived to be successful in serving the citizens through their capabilities on making changes. To achieve this goal, this study explores the brand images of Indonesia's political outsiders who have strong image of reformers which are Jokowi, Ahok and Risma and investigate how they are being perceived to be successful in serving the citizens. The present research, which consist of three studies, conduct exploratory factor analysis using sequential mixed methods. The first two studies utilize qualitative paradigms with interview and document analysis to determine reformist dimensions using thematic analysis. Following this, a survey was launched (n = 453) for a reliability and validity test. The qualitative studies have delineated the reformist characteristics into three dimensions: perceived qualities (three items), implemented programs (four items) and engagement style with citizens (three items). The dimensions have adequate factor analysis values and high reliability scores. Findings suggest that reformist attributes have several traits such as 'anti-corruption', 'innovativeness' and a high rate and unique voter engagement style. This research contributes to the development of political marketing theories on candidates' reformist branding attributable to the phenomenon of the rise of political outsiders. It explores the interplay of leadership and political brand image from the cases of successful rise of political outsiders. The leadership aspects relevant to shape the brand image of a reformist from voters' perspective are discussed based on findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. presidential candidates aspire to have a "presidential image." Political communication researchers, media pundits, political scientists, pollsters, campaign consultants, and other political marketers speculate about who is "presidential" and "unpresidential." No prior research, however, has empirically measured and validated a presidential image construct. Based on data collected prior to the 2020 U.S. presidential election (N = 618 registered likely voters), we tested congeneric models of presidentiality. Results indicated (1) a six-item, single-factor model fit well when single group confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were performed separately on ratings of Donald Trump (Study 1) and Joe Biden (Study 2), (2) multiple-group CFA indicated configural and metric invariance (generalizability across candidates) of the model, and (3) presidential image factor scores were strongly associated with the candidate participants planned to vote for in the election. The resultant indicators also advance theorizing that a U.S. president is expected to serve as both "head of state" through components of personability and as "head of government" through components of capability. Theoretical implications for political marketing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study responds to explicit calls for further research and explores the political co-brand management, positioning and negative image transference between the co-brand and the corporate brand. This study highlights the importance of management/creation of co-brand image in the post-election context from the external stakeholders' perspective, in Pakistan. It evaluates the transfer potential of the Political Co-brand Identity Framework by exploring and examining the co-brand image and the political co-brand positioning in a post-election context. In this way, this study intends to assess the applicability of the Political Co-brand Identity Framework as a tool to assess the image and positioning of political brands from an external perspective. The sample comprises of political analysts/academics. The findings would guide in examining areas which can strengthen political stability, reliability of political brands and build political trust. The study offers important insight for practitioners, researchers, and public policy makers whose concern is to develop marketing strategies and diagnose political co-brand image alignment by comparing desired and actual positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the Trump and Sanders’ campaigns for the presidential nomination of their respective parties. It studies the structure of the relationship between the campaign and its supporters through communication on each candidate’s Facebook page. While both campaigns have been termed populist, we differentiate populism from connectivism and develop an account of a connective campaign as a species of connective action. Whereas populism is predicated on a singular people, connectivity involves the acceptance and recognition of difference as a resource for political activity. Whereas populism involves a hierarchical authority relationship, connectivity is based on a reciprocal authority relationship. Finally, populism articulates an anti-establishment demand while connective campaigns demand for citizens to have the capacity for consequential engagement with political life. The empirical results demonstrate that connectivism and populism are distinct in practice and that these attributes hang together as two separate concepts. Further, we find that Trump’s campaign communications emphasize populist themes, for Sanders such themes are limited and in the shadow of connectivism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the social media strategies of candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We use textual analysis to understand what candidates focused on. We assess eight themes covered in Twitter posts. For example, Clinton focused on GUN CONTROL, while Sanders focused on climate change. Using Facebook data, we introduce a topic modeling approach, latent Dirichlet allocation, to the political marketing literature. This allows us to uncover what topics the candidates focus on without researcher intervention and, using a dynamic model, show how this changes over time. We note that Clinton’s focus on Trump increases toward the end of the primary campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The extensive literature examining the impact of American campaign styles in other countries generally attributes various political changes to the presence of American professionals and imported campaign techniques. Yet foreign professionals working on international campaigns may have more or less influence, and there is little systematic understanding of the factors that contribute to their actual influence over the local campaign. This paper examines the Israeli case as an example of strong penetration of American campaign professionals and techniques and analyzes the factors that contributed to their relatively high level of influence. Following this, a framework is proposed for assessing when imported American professionals and/or styles are likely to have a strong or weak influence on a campaign, based on factors leading to easy adoption or requiring more extensive adaptation. The study finds that in Israel, endogenous factors including social, political, cultural, and economic evolution contributed to the easy adoption of American campaign practices, creating a welcoming environment for American professionals. Thus, the major changes in campaigns often attributed to Americanization in other countries may be due at least in part to organic social, economic, and cultural changes of that society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The campaign consulting business in the United States is the largest in the world and has had some success in globally exporting its expertise in terms of both personnel and technique. This paper reflects on the so-called “Americanization” of British elections and draws attention to some of the significant landmarks in the relationship between strategists in the two countries. The discussion does, however, identify the limitations of this idea as an organizing concept for understanding how election campaigning has developed in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a study of televised political debates based on an integrated model that simultaneously examines verbal and nonverbal communication and their interconnections. An integrative approach yields better explanatory power than a separate analysis of each of these modalities. This model was used to analyze televised debates from Israeli election campaigns and identify consistent discrepancy and nondiscrepancy patterns of behavior of winners and losers. The model also sheds light on gender differences and similarities in a novel perspective of discrepant and nondiscrepant communication styles. A set of propositions on the kinds of behaviors that might be beneficial or detrimental for contenders in a televised debate is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little is known about why candidates decide to make use of emotional messages when campaigning for a political office, and under which conditions this is more likely to happen. We focus on the use of fear and enthusiasm appeals and assume that these are a function of profile of candidates and the nature of the context in which the election takes place. We use a new large-scale comparative dataset which includes information about campaigning strategies for 636 candidates having competed in 133 presidential and parliamentary elections in 101 countries between June 2016 and March 2020, based on judgments of 2000+ domestic and international experts. Our results show that candidates benefitting from a comparative advantage (incumbents and frontrunners) tend to rely on enthusiasm appeals, more extreme candidates prefer fear to enthusiasm, and more competitive races tend to foster the use of fear appeals. These findings have important implications for electoral competition, communication theory, and political marketing. All data and materials are openly available for replication. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2021.1930327. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is directed to examine what drive marketization and professionalization of campaigning of political parties in the emerging democracy of Indonesia. Focusing on such issue, this work adopts Strömbäck' (2007, 2010) and Strömbäck et al.' (2012) conceptual models of marketization and campaign professionalization of political parties and deploys a case study method. The findings are as follows. Following factors encourage these parties to adopt such practices. They include democratization of politics, establishments of the democratic political, government, media and election systems, declines of Indonesian electorates' partisanship and number of loyal voters, the emergence of rational voting behaviors, ICT development and increasing influence of the media logic in political news productions, domination of the media agenda over the political agenda and numbers of media consumers and the Internet and social media users who strongly engaged in political consumerism and activism. This work offers an analytical model that visualizes the structural factors and conditions, which stimulate political parties in the emerging democracy of Indonesia to take up such practices. We could consider this model as we want to evaluate developments of marketization and professionalization of campaigning of political parties in the emerging democracies, especially those shared similarity with Indonesian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual social media platform Instagram is a popular tool for political image building. Drawing on image management theory as well as right-wing populist and visual communication, this study explores how eight European leading politicians of right-wing populist parties present themselves on Instagram. The aim is to provide a first insight into relevant characteristics and patterns of their Instagram communication. The approach is twofold: A comprehensive visual content analysis (N = 724) is followed by hierarchical clustering on principal components. Three types of messages were identified, the most important ones being the creation of a professional image and the demonstration of closeness to citizens. Surprisingly few of the categories considered as relevant for right-wing populist communication were detected. At the individual level, politicians differ in the messages they emphasize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political marketing has borrowed and adapted many terms from mainstream marketing, such as image management (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) and consumer (voter). In marketing, the terms “user” and “usage” have been established, yet their application to political marketing is less clear. This paper analyzes the feasibility and usefulness of usage in the political context. Drawing from the literature on usage, a model is developed and applied to four voting environments: Britain, Australia, Russia, and Belarus. One critical factor that emerges is the concept of choice, whereby the voter may chose to indicate their preference for one party yet be forced to use a different party as chosen by collective choice. Another issue is the potential for habitual voting behavior to limit decision making. It is concluded that usage needs to be contextualized specifically for political marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After 45 years of communism, Bulgaria held its first democratic elections in May 1990, following an interparty coup that had ended the totalitarian rule in November 1989. A new Bulgarian Constitution was adopted in 1991. During the following years of transition to democracy, a normal political environment was gradually established. Among the major achievements during this period were that the country joined NATO in spring 2004 and entered the European Union in January 2007. During this period of transition to a democratic political system and marketplace economy, the processes of decentralization, liberalization, and privatization led to a completely new media landscape with strong social impact. The past two decades have witnessed five presidential (1992, 1996, 2001, 2006, and 2011), seven parliamentary (1990, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2009), six local (1991, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011), and two European parliamentary elections (2007 and 2009) and the appointment of twelve governments in Bulgaria. The main objective of the proposed paper is to present the impact of media and, in particular, of television on the democratization developments in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores Internet tools used for consensus building during the 2010 Italian regional elections, especially focusing on the use of the Internet to involve the electorate in a background of political disaffection. Previous experience from the United States and European countries suggests that the Internet is an interesting tool for the creation and development of consensus and shows an increasing use of Internet-based communication for elections. In this context, the research has two objectives. The first is to measure the degree of use of Internet tools by the main candidates to develop participation in several local areas, more limited than those traditionally investigated in the literature. To this end, we used the technique of analysis of site functionality, properly integrated to make it suitable for measuring the use of tools for participation, to compute for each candidate a reliable index of participation. Second, the work aims to understand how different contexts of electoral competition may encourage or lessen the inclination to use Internet communication tools in a participative sense. The analysis reveals a positive correlation between the affiliation of the candidate for the ruling party and the tendency for this candidate to use tools of participation more than the competitor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the role played by social media in shaping political debate during the UK election campaign of May 2010, with a focus on local application within two constituencies in Hampshire. Barack Obama's presidential campaign was such a digital triumph that it propelled social media onto the radar of marketers within commercial organisations worldwide. Literature in the field of political marketing has recommended the development of relationship marketing strategies in politics (e.g., Henneberg and O'Shaughnessy 2009) but more research is needed to focus on the role of social technologies and to bring theory up to speed with practice (Harris and Lock 2010). Our paper concludes that the UK general election was far being from an “Internet election.” There was little evidence of the methodical and integrated approach to online and offline engagement demonstrated by the Obama campaign. Our contribution asserts that, as in the business world, social media communications can add significant value at the local level when implemented as part of a systematic and long-term online and offline relationship-building strategy but are not well suited to short-term applications intended to influence the outcome of particular campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to review the notion of branding and evaluate its applicability to political parties. As ideological politics is in decline, branding may provide a consistent narrative where voters feel a sense of warmth and belonging. The paper aims to build an understanding of the complexity of building a political brand where a combination of image, logo, leadership, and values can all contribute to a compelling brand narrative. It investigates how competing positive and negative messages attempt to build and distort the brand identity. A critical review of branding, relationship marketing, and political science literature articulates the conceptual development of branding and its applicability to political parties. The success or failure of negative campaigning is due to the authenticity of a political party's brand values—creating a coherent brand story—if there is no distance between the brand values articulated by the political party and the values their community perceives then this creates an “authentic” brand. However, if there is a gap this paper illustrates how negative campaigning can be used to build a “doppelgänger brand,” which undermines the credibility of the authentic political brand. The paper argues that political parties need to understand how brand stories are developed but also how they can be used to protect against negative advertising. This has implications for political marketing strategists and political parties. This paper draws together branding theory and relationship marketing and incorporates them into a framework that makes a contribution to the political marketing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although political and marketing analysts commonly describe political candidates as brands, the conceptualization of political candidates as brands within academic research and popular culture is uncommon. This paper presents empirical evidence in support of viewing candidates as such. Using data from a nationwide study that measures the self concept of Mexican voters and their perceived images of the presidential candidates in Mexico's 2006 election, the paper demonstrates that voters see themselves and each candidate as a distinct brand. Furthermore, this view of a voter's self-brand influences his or her perception of a political candidate's brand image. The academic and managerial implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a result of changes in the campaign landscape, candidates have several strategic options available to them, particularly when considering how to respond to voters’ gender stereotypes. The goal of this paper is to understand candidates’ use of strategies based on gender stereotypes by emphasizing either particular issues or particular traits that are commonly associated with one gender or the other. To do this, I developed hypotheses of why candidates might choose a trait or issues strategy based on gender stereotypes. I tested these hypotheses using a large-scale content analysis of candidate websites over four election cycles. I found that female candidates mostly pursued strategies that were consistent with gender stereotypes. Interestingly, female candidates were found to have different strategies on different pages of their websites. I discuss the implications of gender-based strategies for the election of female candidates and for representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]