GUEST EDITORIAL. Political Marketing in Evolving European Democracies

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1 GUEST EDITORIAL Political Marketing in Evolving European Democracies The dynamic development of Information Technology, resulting in the development of the Internet and new technologies used for wireless multimedia transmission which are increasingly available to ordinary people, is creating a new information society (see, e.g., Toffler, & Toffler, 1995). Such society implements what in recent decades has been the subject of laboratory research conducted within the constructivist paradigm of cognitive psychology. The constructivist approach was very well presented in Ulric Neisser s classic work Cognitive Psychology (1967) and in the collection edited by Jerome Bruner Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing (1973), where the authors analyzed in detail the psychological mechanisms of creating the representations of reality in the human mind. According to this approach, a man goes beyond the perceived stimuli, constructing, on the basis of them, his or her own world as a cognitive representation of the reality that surrounds him or her. Despite the fact that many precise empirical studies reveal the cognitive mechanisms of creating such a mental world, they have frequently been challenged. It is said that this world is the laboratory world and has little to do with the world in which one functions on an everyday basis. For instance, it is believed that the perceptual illusions Journal of Political Marketing, Vol. 3(2) by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Digital Object Identifier: /J199v03n02_01 1

2 2 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL MARKETING presented in psychology handbooks, so-called ambiguous figures, occur only in the fictitious world of laboratory research and never in the real world (see, e.g., Gibson, 1979). One of the classical examples of such ambiguous figures is presented in Figure 1. If one asks what animal is presented in this picture, then one will notice a lack of agreement among the observers. Some people will say that it presents a duck, some will see a rabbit. A thorough analysis suggests that the figure may be perceived by the observer in a twofold way: once as a duck and once as a rabbit. What can be seen here is then the creating of different representations, i.e., different realities, on the basis of identical sensory stimulation. This example is only a simple demonstration, which allows the reader to experience directly the various possible interpretations of the same picture, which in cognitive psychology is called switch-gestalt. Such examples may be treated as curiosities one may observe on the pages of the book or the computer screen in a laboratory, yet it is difficult to say that one experiences them in everyday life. However, given the current level of civilization s development, one may wonder whether this criticized laboratory world is not a perfect model of what is now going on in the social reality that surrounds man. FIGURE 1

3 Guest Editorial 3 The rapid development of the media and the possibility of reaching each person with information encourage each individual to construct in his or her mind a certain way of perceiving the surrounding reality. Then another question arises: Who would be interested in such constructing? In the first place the manager responsible for marketing strategies in business and also political marketing consultants. The first group uses the achievements of modern social science for influencing customer behavior, whereas the other group uses them for influencing voter behavior. The increasingly sophisticated promotional campaigns used by them influence the cognitive and emotional spheres of the voters, creating a certain image of reality in their minds. In this way the customer or the voter becomes a puppet in the hands of the manager who, by controlling his behavior, is limiting his freedom. In the development of democratic societies where freedom is particularly valued, this situation is a bit of a paradox. The very foundation of the development of such societies is the freedom of their citizens. This freedom, however, permits the development of advanced marketing strategies, whose purpose is to convince the customer to buy a given product or vote for a particular political option. The side effect of such strategies thus limits customer s and voter s freedom of behavior. However, the character of limiting freedom is different in democratic states than it is in totalitarian states. In the latter group the limits are imposed from outside the individual. Legal acts, state laws, and other official rulings limit the freedom of ordinary citizens actions, as was the case in the communist states of Central and East Europe. Those citizens were to a great extent aware of the limitations imposed by the state on their freedom. In democratic countries this limitation is imposed from the inside. The individual him or herself is its source, because he or she has a certain picture of a certain fragment of reality in his or her mind, which provokes certain actions. The character of such internal limitation is significantly more dangerous than that of the external one. Normally, one does not realize that he or she is not fully free, and there are no formal ways to resist this state of affairs. It is possible, however, to discover how social and psychological mechanisms controlling man s behavior operate. These mechanisms are the basis of the applied marketing strategies. Business and political marketing strategies using the power of the media s influence have expanded, metaphorically speaking, the constructive oriented laboratory of cognitive psychology to the natural social environment in democratic countries. This is very well demonstrated by Bruce I. Newman s book The Mass Marketing of Politics:

4 4 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL MARKETING Democracy in an Age of Manufactured Images (1999), whose very title points to the fact that the process of creating politicians images is becoming increasingly important in modern democracies. After 1989, many countries of East and Central Europe which belonged to the Soviet Bloc opposed the dictatorship of totalitarianism and started the process of democratization. They followed various institutional patterns from established democracies. Economic marketing along with political marketing began to develop rapidly. Mass media began to be used to create economic and political realities in the minds of customers and voters. The reality constructed in such a way is reinforced by so-called brand images, in which the identities of political and economic objects are recorded. It is exactly these images, loaded with powerful emotions, that control the behavior of the customer and voter. It can be said, then, that the development of democracy in the former Soviet Bloc countries is heading in the same direction that the US and Western Europe are heading. This collection of articles presents research on political marketing and social communication conducted in a few East and Central European countries: Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In the first article Wojciech Cwalina, Andrzej Falkowski, Bruce Newman, and Dejan Ver i present the results of comparative empirical research on political choices in Poland, Slovenia, and the U.S. The concept of the research located in the methodology of structural equations defines the causal relation between cognitive domains and emotional attitude toward the candidate, which are important indications of voting preferences. In addition, including the role of the media in forming political cognition shows its important function in modifying other cognitive domains (representations of the world of politics), as well as emotional attitude. A good fit of the theoretical models to the results of the empirical research conducted in Poland, Slovenia, and the U.S. is an important argument supporting the assumption that the development of democratization and political marketing in these three countries is to a large extent formed by the media. Krystyna Skar y ska s article presents a way of studying the so-called television character of politicians on the basis of the psychological concept of personality well-known in psychological literature: the Big Five. Although the presented empirical analyses refer to the Polish political scene, the methodology of research proposed here may well be used in studying the television image of a politician in any country. A description of such an image is relevant for developing marketing strategies for political elections.

5 Guest Editorial 5 Krzysztof Przybyszewski demonstrates in his article how party affiliation influences the assessment of the candidate s attractiveness and how this assessment is distorted by the reception of new information. Although loyal voters are resistant to changing their attitude to their candidate after receiving new information, such information has an important influence upon perceiving candidates from other parties. The research presented in the article is an excellent empirical example of the constructivism in perception discussed above. It shows the differences in the assessment of the same candidate, depending upon his party affiliation. The last two articles discussing political choices in Hungary and Bulgaria have a descriptive character. Lilia Raycheva stresses the growing importance of the media in forming voting preferences and distorting the political processes in Bulgaria. Jol n R ka, focusing on the importance of a candidate s image in electoral politics, shows how the mass media and the Internet play a global role in shaping and modifying social reality. These articles present the constructivist approach to studying political life and public communication strategies. As summed up by Jolan Roka: An important feature of symbols is that the political knowledge involved in them does not contain empirical facts...its function is not to describe reality but rather to create the possibilities for the desired identification and to direct activities. Andrzej Falkowski and Wojciech Cwalina Andrzej Falkowski and Wojciech Cwalina Guest Editors Warsaw School of Advanced Social Psychology Warsaw, Poland REFERENCES Bruner, J. S. (1973). Beyond the information given. Studies in the psychology of knowing. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Newman, B. I. (1999). The mass marketing of politics: Democracy in an age of manufactured images. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Toffler, A., Toffler, H. (1995). Creating a new civilization: The politics of the Third Wave. Atlanta: Turner Publishing.