Suchergebnisse

A review essay on books by (1) Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Political Marketing and British Political Parties (Manchester: Manchester U Press, 2001); (2) Bruce I. Newman (Ed), Handbook of Political Marketing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999); & (3) Fritz Plasser & Gunda Plasser, Global Political Campaigning. A Worldwide Analysis of Campaign Professionals and Their Practices (Westport: Praeger, 2002). The reviewer aims to delineate a general overview about political marketing, a subject located somewhere among political science, communication, psychology, & marketing. This subject is not well known in the Italian academic & professional panorama, but is quite developed in the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially after Downs's book on the "economic democracy." This contribution distinguishes between two different approaches to political marketing: The "reductionist" approach confines political marketing to the use of sophisticated technologies of communication & polling for the electoral campaign. The "holistic" approach considers instead the political marketing as a completely new paradigm, through which one can "read" & understand the entire complex of political phenomena. The article ends with an analysis of chances & risks regarding the application of marketing principles in the political arena. 20 References. Adapted from the source document.

From its colonial history, the twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago inherited a uniquely diverse population of 1.3 million, including descendants of East Indians, Africans, Chinese, Syrians and Lebanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and British, among others. The legacy of the British divide et impera, paired with the perceived ethnic diversity, has been marking and re-producing a deep "Us vs. Them" division, especially between the two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%). For over forty years, the two ethnic groups have been struggling for political control through census counts and voting along ethnic lines. Although elections in the country have always served as "the critical arbiter in adjudicating the rival claims by the main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege" (Premdas 2004: 19), the 2010 General Election seemed to have marked a turning point in the history of the nation. On May 24th, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female Prime Minister and only the second person of East Indian origin to hold the PM office in 48 years of independence. Breaking out of the country's rigid bipolar political mould, Persad-Bissessar won as the leader of the People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. She defeated Patrick Manning's People's National Movement and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of the 41 in the House of Representatives. Taking this unprecedented political success as its starting point, this dissertation explores the discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar's election, analyzing a large corpus of textual and visual data from the People's Partnership campaign. The starting assumption is that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered coalition party but also by discursively positing a new, inclusive identity space throughout the campaign and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in the country. Therefore, I set to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, defining her role as the first woman PM candidate in the history of the country, legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalisms, as well as fostering a wider national sense of belonging. As political communication has increasingly grown beyond the realm of verbal language, understanding Persad-Bissessar's political meaning-making required both the analysis of her election speeches as well as the study of a number of multimodal texts, such as video and printed ads as well as official portraits, which played a crucial role in the political advertising of her coalition. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I will combine the 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (Wodak and Meyer 2009) for the analysis of Persad-Bissessar's textual data and Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) 'Visual Grammar' for the analysis of the visual data. Although the English-speaking Caribbean is home to the largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries around the globe, political discourse from the archipelago is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. The analysis of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago has the potential to shed light on the complexities, struggles and contradictions of the postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago by integrating knowledge about historical sources and the social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. Starting from the analysis of political discourse, this work aims at offering a new, discursive perspective on ethnicity, identity and power in Trinidad and Tobago as well as increasing scholarly awareness for the development of a critical interpretative stance for political texts and talks beyond the Euro-American zone.

Starting from an analysis of the relationship between cognitive variables (such as the "level of interest in politics") & evaluative-affective variables (in particular, individual evaluations of political leaders), this article explores the perception that different segments of the electorate had of Silvio Berlusconi & of his Center-Left opponent Francesco Rutelli. Focus is on the degree of popularity of the two candidates & voters' opinions of their personal & political qualities. These two aspects of the candidate evaluation process are taken into account in both relational & diachronic terms, the former with special attention to the concept of "coalition belonging" that applies the classic notion of partisanship to the new main cleavage in Italian electoral politics, & the latter monitoring the evolution of voters' attitudes toward the candidates & identifying four main effects of the electoral campaign: "polarization," "involvement gap," "vedette," & "disenchantment.". 19 Tables, 1 Figure, 20 References. Adapted from the source document.

In November 2003, at the end of a ten-year process, the EU passed legislation (Regulation (EC) No 20044/2003) on the granting of public subsidies to European political parties, thus laying down the conditions governing both their funding & their implicit recognition. The article explores in detail this normative framework & the political implications of the European party finance law. It is argued that the case for granting political parties EU public subsidies has been based on the same arguments as national party-funding legislation & that the European legislation contains provisions that resemble those applicable within member states, despite the fact that political parties perform substantially different functions at European & national levels owing to the special features of the EU's institutional & political architecture. It is also argued that the granting of EU subsidies to political parties has very largely been cast within the debate on the "democratic deficit," but it is unlikely to contribute substantially to remedying that deficit & to fostering the development of a party system at the EU level that can help to kick-start momentum towards integration. The article analyzes the European party finance law by comparison with the national legislation of several member states, & presents a preliminary assessment of the impact of the new Regulation on the European political landscape during the first two years of application. References. Adapted from the source document.