Market Driven Politics

With the globalisation of the capitalist economy the economic role of national governments is now largely confined to controlling inflation and facilitating home-grown market performance. This represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between politics and economics; it has been particularly marked in Britain, but is relevant to many other contexts. Market-Driven Politics is a multi-level study, moving between an analysis of global economic forces through national politics to the changes occurring week by week in two fields of public life that are both fundamentally important and familiar to everyone.television broadcasting and health care. Public services like these play an important role, because they both affect the legitimacy of the government and are targets for global capital. This book provides an original analysis of the key processes of commodification of public services, the conversion of public-service workforces into employees motivated to generate profit, and the role of the state in absorbing risk. Understanding the dynamics of each of these trends becomes critical not just for the analysis of market-driven politics but also for the longer-term defence of democracy and the collective values on which it depends.

Exploring the new era of political advertising beyond television and print, this book focuses on the mediums of the new millennia that are transforming campaigning and communications in political systems around the world. The author illustrates how the use of social, digital and mobile advertising enables political marketers to deliver messages more accurately and strengthen relationships between stakeholders such as voters, supporters and candidates. Examining digital and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, this innovative book analyses the changing political marketing landscape and proposes conceptual models for implementing more successful and effective political communications in the future.

Political marketing has become a global phenomenon as parties try to copy the market-oriented approach employed by Tony Blair to win power for New Labour in 1997. It raises fresh perspectives on the more established political marketing practices in the UK and US, such as how to incorporate political leadership within the market-oriented framework and the democratic implications when faced with the actual business of governing. This book also highlights how the market-oriented party approach has spread around the world, including Europe and the new democracies of Brazil and Peru. The collection also introduces the debate on whether such practices enhance or undermine democracy, raising important questions on the future of political marketing.

Ever since Adam Smith suggested his concept of the 'invisible hand', advocates of the market have argued that social cohension, material prosperity and political vitality have been best served by a policy of non-intervention. This book guides the reader through the complex field of social theorizing based on the capital market.

This book offers a critical re-thinking of the way in which traditional market logic - derived from mainstream economics and managerial marketing - has for decades commonly been applied in the theoretical understanding of democratic politics within influential quarters of political science and in later years also the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of political marketing. Such approaches are founded on the assumption that all markets are driven exclusively by exchange dynamics and this has in turn rendered the most basic workings of co-production and participation-oriented party-centred political systems theoretically invisible. The author starts by providing a thorough and wide-ranging critical assessment of the theoretical underpinnings of the contemporary political marketing literature and its market-based political science antecedents. Using a relationship marketing perspective the author goes on to offer a re-conceptualisation of these political spheres in terms of 'markets' which addresses the theoretical inadequacies of prior research. She closes by examining some of the most important practical implications that this alternative approach to party-centred politics may have for the marketing efforts of contemporary membership parties. This book is essential reading to all those interested in party-centred politics and political marketing, as well as democratic theorists and students of political theory in general.

Citizens are caught in a paradox. Voting levels are falling, there are growing feelings of powerlessness, social unfairness and yet citizens are constantly told that they have more choice as well as greater freedom and liberty. This book brilliantly explains these discrepancies. It shows that the new definitions of freedom as responsibility to create prosperity through markets is seriously distorting citizenship whilst appearing to be unbiased and neutral. It exposes inconsistencies in the market-based and apolitical vision of our collective future. This book: outlines how market citizenship involves a new kind of rationality in which citizens are defined as individualized utility maximizers shows how the idea that citizens act primarily to develop their narrow self-interest has encouraged the creation of competitive governance mechanisms analyses how market mechanisms are used to decide who are ′winners′ and ′losers′ - from the loss of youth groups funding to global treaties discussess the shortfalls when key contemporary issues are tackled through ′win-win′ solutions with business working alongside consumers, with little or no role for government explaims how localism and the devolution of power is being used to support the status quo. suggests new kinds of engagement are emerging because markets have undermined politics. Essential reading for students, policy-makers and researchers of citizenship within sociology, politics, economics, geography and social policy.

This volume pulls together commentaries on Charles E. Lindblom's book entitled "Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems" (1977) which expounds the thesis that big business dominates American culture and politics and prevents the introduction of central planning in place of a market-oriented economy. Following an introduction, this collection of essays is organized into two parts. Part 1 contains arguments against the book's thesis in these six essays: "Pluralism Reconsidered" by Eugene Bardach; "An Alarmist View of Corporate Influence" by Royall Brandis; "How Powerful is Business?" by Ithiel de Sola Pool; "Democracy and the Corporation" by James Q. Wilson; "Business, Government, the Public: Who Manipulates Whom?" by Paul J. Halpern; and "The Servility of Business" by Clarence J. Brown. Part 2 contains an essay by David Stockman entitled "How the Market Outwits the Planners" which is a rebuttal of Lindblom's claim that natural resources will be depleted in an economy based on production-for-profit. (KW)