Marketing Democracy

By focusing on the construction and practice of democracy aid, this book shows how democracy aid can reinforce, rather than challenge authoritarian regimes.

Amid protests against the Pinochet regime, a group of población(shantytown) residents came together in 1984 to challenge poor health care in their community and to denounce military rule. How did their organization respond seven years later when Chile's transition to democracy brought an end to dictatorship but no clear solution to ongoing health problems? Marketing Democracy shows how the exercise of power and the strategies of social movements transformed with the transition from a military to an elected-civilian regime in Chile. The term "marketing democracy" refers first to how contemporary democracies are shaped by transnational market forces, and second to how politicians have promoted democracy with the twin goals of attracting foreign capital and diminishing social movements.

Bruce I. Newman reveals how the US public is being manipulated by marketing strategies and tactics taken directly from the most successful market-led companies. He uncovers the emphasis on style over substance and sound-bite over real dialogue.

The quest for freedom from hunger and repression has triggered in recent years a dramatic, worldwide reform of political and economic systems. Never have so many people enjoyed, or at least experimented with democratic institutions. However, many strategies for economic development in Eastern Europe and Latin America have failed with the result that entire economic systems on both continents are being transformed. This major book analyzes recent transitions to democracy and market-oriented economic reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Drawing in a quite distinctive way on models derived from political philosophy, economics, and game theory, Professor Przeworski also considers specific data on individual countries. Among the questions raised by the book are: What should we expect from these experiments in democracy and market economy? What new economic systems will emerge? Will these transitions result in new democracies or old dictatorships?

Marketing has a greater purpose, and marketers, a higher calling, than simply selling more widgets, according to John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. In Greater Good, the authors contend that marketing performs an essential societal function--and does so democratically. They maintain that people would benefit if the realms of politics and marketing were informed by one another's best principles and practices. Quelch and Jocz lay out the six fundamental characteristics that marketing and democracy share: (1) exchange of value, such as goods, services, and promises, (2) consumption of goods and services, (3) choice in all decisions, (4) free flow of information, (5) active engagement of a majority of individuals, and (6) inclusion of as many people as possible. Without these six traits, both marketing and democracy would fail, and with them, society. Drawing on current and historical examples from economies around the world, this landmark work illuminates marketing's critical role in the development, growth, and governance of societies. It reveals how good marketing practices improve the political process and--in turn--the practice of democracy itself.

This book examines mass marketing techniques in a political rather than economic context. The authors' thesis remains persuasive: democratic politics, precisely because it requires mass support for its legitimation, increases the need for public opinion to be channelized and focused. This is precisely the task of marketing in the political process.Increasingly, advanced societies are involved in symbolic rather than direct forms of struggle. As a result, management of ideas becomes crucial to both political survival and economic expansion. Romain Laufer and Catherine Paradeise argue that public opinion and media formation is built into the fabric of Western political culture, dating from the Sophists in ancient Greece through Machiavelli in the aristocratic baronies of pre-capitalist Europe. With the rise of the bureaucratic-administrative state in the West, the need for persuasive public opinion analysis became part of the fabric of the advanced Western democratic and capitalist nations.The volume benefits from authors trained and familiar with the traditions of both the United States and Europe. They are able to consider contrasts in marketing styles as well as continuities of contents among advanced nation-states. No simple "how-to" manual, this bracingly different volume discusses its subject with an easy command of the philosophical and cultural literatures, as well as the major classics of economics, sociology, and political science.

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.

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.