PACKAGING POLITICS by Catherine Suzanne Galloway A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate Division of the University of California at Berkeley Committee in charge Professor Jack Citrin, Chair Professor Eric Schickler Professor Taeku Lee Professor Tom Goldstein Fall 2012 Abstract Packaging Politics by Catherine Suzanne Galloway Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Jack Citrin, Chair The United States, with its early consumerist orientation, has a lengthy history of drawing on similar techniques to influence popular opinion about political issues and candidates as are used by businesses to market their wares to consumers. Packaging Politics looks at how the rise of consumer culture over the past 60 years has influenced presidential campaigning and political culture more broadly. Drawing on interviews with political consultants, political reporters, marketing experts and communications scholars, Packaging Politics explores the formal and informal ways that commercial marketing methods – specifically emotional and open source branding and micro and behavioral targeting – have migrated to the political realm, and how they play out in campaigns, specifically in presidential races. Heading into the 2012 elections, how much truth is there to the notion that selling politicians is like “selling soap”? What is the difference today between citizens and consumers? And how is the political process being transformed, for better or for worse, by the use of increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques? 1 Packaging Politics is dedicated to my parents, Russell & Nancy Galloway & to my professor and friend Jack Citrin i CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Politics, after all, is about marketing – about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. - Ellen McGirt, The Brand Called Obama Packaging Politics While there is no doubt that the term “packaging” originated in the consumer realm, the United States has a long history of drawing on techniques used by businesses to market their wares to consumers in order to influence popular opinion about political issues and candidates. Packaging Politics looks at the historical development of a trend: how techniques from consumer marketing have influenced presidential campaigning and political discourse over the past sixty years. We also look at several contemporary manifestations of the trend, including: Emotional Branding – which attempts to speak to people’s emotions or desires rather than their rational/conscious minds. Open Source Branding – designed to make the consumer / citizen feel a part of the product / politician by allowing them to be involved in branding from the ground up.1 Database Driven Targeting – whether in politics on the consumer world uses sophisticated databases that store a wealth of personal information about people and generate specific, detailed “profiles” used to target them in a variety of ways Behavioral Targeting – which tracks individuals’ online behavior, gathering information about them and then communicating messages back that reflect their perceived interests/inclinations. Drawing primarily on a systematic set of interviews with dozens of political consultants, marketing experts, political reporters and communications scholars - as well as on secondary literature - I explore these central questions: How and when have trends and techniques that evolved in the consumer realm migrated to the political sphere? What are some of the conditions – cultural, economic, demographic, and technological – that paved the way for these migrations? How have some of the most prominent of these trends and techniques played out in contemporary campaigning - specifically in presidential races? 1 Are there implications of trends and techniques born of the consumer world for electoral politics and democratic discourse? If so, what are they? ***************************************** As evidenced by Joe McGinnis’s 1969 book The Selling of the President, packaging politics is an idea that has been around for quite a while.2 Eye opening though it may have been for much of America when McGinnis detailed the modern television-driven presidential campaign and its reliance on consumer advertising techniques, the notion of “selling” a candidate – sometimes referred to as “political marketing” – was not a new concept.3 Consumer advertisers and marketers were turning their attention to political candidates as early as the 1920s. Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, dubbed the father of American public relations, is one prominent example.4 The first so-called political consultants, Clem Whittaker and Leone Baxter, operated Campaigns Inc. in California beginning in the 1930s, pioneering extensive scripting and packaging of campaign messages, and working for both political and corporate clients. By nearly all accounts though, television, “the atom bomb” of electoral politics, led to the greatest surge in consumer marketing’s influence on presidential campaigning. In the 1950s and ‘60s, with television’s centrality to the political process becoming increasingly evident, many Madison Avenue advertising agencies accustomed to selling consumer goods and services on television began moving into the business of selling candidates. The politician - soap analogy was already in play during the Eisenhower Stevenson campaign of 1952, when Stevenson famously claimed that presidential candidates were being sold like “breakfast cereal” - a development he referred to as the “ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”5 While Stevenson was among the first to bemoan the escalating influence of consumer marketing techniques on campaigning, he was far from last. But how seriously should the public take this well-worn concern that our politicians are little more than packaged products? If we accept that there is at least some measure of “packaging” involved in presidential campaigns, is it more prevalent or sophisticated now than it was at the dawn of the television age? And if so, what are the implications? The Aim of this Project The aim of Packaging Politics is to advance our understanding of some of the ways in which, since the birth of TV, consumer marketing techniques and trends have influenced political campaigning and political discourse in the United States. I argue that over the last sixty years, consumer marketing has increasingly influenced electoral politics, and that certain techniques and trends adapted from the consumer realm have been especially influential. I also consider the conditions that have paved the way for that influence, including demographic, economic, cultural and technological shifts leading to, for example, less face to face campaigning between candidates and citizens; an ever rising tide of money in electoral politics; shifting campaign structures and agents 2 of influence; and evolving cultural norms and expectations – specifically the dominance of the consumer vis a vis the citizen for the better part of the past 35 years and the implications those shifts had for how people understood themselves in relation to each other, their elected representatives and society as a whole.6 While the main empirical focus of this project is descriptive: the goal to understand what prominent consumer trends and techniques migrated to the political sphere over the past sixty years, when and how they migrated, and how they became embedded within the electoral realm - the project is animated by questions of implications: whether and how various forms of targeting and branding we look at here are likely to yield “good” versus “bad” decision-making in the political sphere or to facilitate or hinder democratic discourse or other forms of democratic engagement.7 While coming to concrete, empirically verifiable conclusions about implications is beyond the scope of this project, implications questions nonetheless inspire and motivate the research. Thus a key component of Packaging Politics is thinking though existing literature on democratic potential and decision making and considering how the electoral process is affected by marketing techniques born of the consumer realm. We turn to some of that literature now. Democracy: A Contested Ideal What constitutes (or should constitute) democracy has been disputed for thousands of years. Democratic theorists have spanned the range in terms of their perceptions of the democratic potential of average people and what sort of participation or engagement in government citizens should ideally have. At least as old as Socrates, the question of what democracy should be / look like / consist of is as hotly contested as ever. Founding political myths tend toward the tidy and unambiguous, and one of the most storied is Athenian democracy. Among the Greek democracies of the era, Athens was best known for its robust democratic participation - its citizens’ deep engagement with political affairs, from membership in assemblies and participation in often lengthy and nuanced discussions and debates, to serving on courts and taking the just application of the laws seriously, to Athenian democrats’ storied capacity for equanimity and calm in the face of something as potentially volatile as direct democracy. While the birth narrative of the United States has also been idealized over time, mapping the course to American democracy was clearly a complex and at times deeply disputed