Consensus and Democratic Legitimacy: Political Marketing versus Political Philosophy

Volume 5, Issue 1 December 2010

hrss hamburg review of social sciences

Consensus and democratic legitimacy: Political Marketing versus Political Philosophy

Mori Luca, PhD *

Abstract

This article aims to reconsider the link between consensus and democratic legitimation,assuming that the growing pervasiveness of political marketing urges political philosophyand sociology to consider to what extent our questions on democratic legitimation arecompelling and appropriate. The knotty point is highlighted by comparing the basic as-sumptions of two contemporary theories of idealized consensus (Habermas and Rawls)and deliberative democracy theories with the idea of consensus deducible from some in-fluential studies about propaganda techniques and political marketing. In conclusion, Iwill argue that a more realistic approach to the issues of “consensus” and “legitimacy”can help us to grasp important aspects of our problem. Political theory needs a “realistic turn” – inspired by Max Weber among others – to investigate the historically and actually legitimizing processes, taking into account that political market-ing gives rise to a type of legitimacy which was not envisaged in classical models, such as Weber’s theory of power: legitimation through professional communication and me-dia management, that is political power generated by communication power.

* Luca Mori is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Pisa (Italy)

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1. Introduction

The theme of ‘consensus’, with the variety of its expressions, is located in the intersection

of fundamental theoretical issues of political philosophy and sociology. As an interdiscip-

linary theme par excellence, it is exposed to several and sometimes incompatible ap-

proaches. One of the most relevant and yet underestimated problems concerns the nexus

between consensus and democratic legitimation: it has often been assumed that consensus

is one of the basilar conditions for legitimation, but it is not clear which kind of consen-

sus could play such a legitimating function.

Influential contemporary philosophers like Jürgen Habermas (1981) and John

Rawls (1971; 1993; 2001) associate legimitacy and justice of a well-ordered society with

reaching consensus through open communication of rational social actors, that are

represented as capable of speech and willing to intersect their different points of view.

Deliberative democracy theorists1 claim that “collective public deliberation is the defini-

tive democratic experience” (Gabardi 2001: 550) and that

[...] it is a necessary condition for attaining legimitacy and rationality with regard to collective decision making process in a polity, that the institutions of this polity are so arranged that what is considered in the common interest of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals (Benhabib 1996: 69).

These basic claims require the existence of a free public sphere and a set of procedures

such as to allow fair collective deliberation processes: participants are supposed to be ra-

tional and equal citizens prepared to fair argumentation, and well disposed to persuade or

be persuaded without manipulation and coercion. Given such general coordinates, there is

a considerable gap between the actual quality of debate under conditions of mass democ-

racy (Chambers 2004) and “the intuitive ideal of a democratic association in which the

justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument

and reasoning among equal citizens” (Cohen 1997: 72). Deliberative democracy theories

have difficulty in dealing with this crucial gap and correlated problems such as those

pointed out by Chambers (2004), with regard to how to mitigate or contain low quality of

public communication under conditions of mass democracy. In short, we need to better

understand and to deal with the following divarication: where idealized models point out

1 Cf. Bohman (1996), Dryzek (1990), Fishkin (1992), Bohman / Rehg (eds. 1997).

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all implications of a rationally motivated consensus among citizens and parties, both for-

mally and substantively equal2, there influential theories and empirical research in the

field of political communication give an antithetical view of political consensus, citizens,

and parties.

A singular coincidence connects the two opposite points of view. Like Haber-

mas’s Theory of Communicative Action, the first compendium in the disciplines of Politi-

cal Communication (Nimmo/Sanders 1981), whose second section contains a chapter by

Lynda Lee Kaid on political advertising, was published in 1981. Two years earlier, in the

1979 British General Elections, the Tories election team and Margaret Thatcher had

commissioned the Saatchi & Saatchi agency to create an advertising campaign in the

middle of “Winter of Discontent”: the message “Britain’s better off with the Conserva-

tives” was presented as the conclusion inferred by the slogan “Labour is not working”,

associated with the image of a long queue in front of an Unemployment office. It was a

significant example of how political advertising techniques could insinuate hasty associa-

tions and seemingly consequent inferences through oversimplified messages.

More generally speaking, there is no doubt that political advertisements can twist

facts and mislead the public (Jamieson 1984; Jamieson 1992; Westen 2007). In spite of

any idealized model, the public sphere is far from being transparent, freely accessible,

and immune to strategic actions. Philosophers of the past did not ignore the gap between

the ideal conception of the consent that might be obtained in an imaginary situation of so-

cial contract, and historical facts of agreement, which always involve the presence of

some degree of coercion.

There is no need to refer to the last acquirements of mind sciences to argue that a

state of purely rational consensus is a fiction. In traditional social contract views (Hobbes,

Locke and Rousseau), passions such as fear or hope are an integral part of the calculating

reason, so that the contractors’ rationality is not entirely ‘dispassionate’.

Thinking back over the ancient Greece, we should add that “[t]he tension existing

between theories of emotion-based enchantment and reason-based proof has haunted rhe-

toric and politics forever” (Gronbeck 2004: 137). Indeed, the power of eloquent speech

and the possibility of using language in such a way as to produce a desired belief upon

2 Cohen (1997: 75): “Finally, ideal deliberation aims to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus – to find reasons that are persuasive to all who are committed to acting on the results of a free and reasoned assessment of alternative [...]”.

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the hearer had already troubled Plato in his Gorgias, when he went so far as to compare

rhetoric to culinary arts.

Beginning from Corax of Syracuse and his pupil Tisias, one of the main assump-

tions of rhetoric was that a likely (eikos) narrative might be more credible than a true

one3. Correlating rhetoric, Sophism and marketing, Romain Laufer and Catherin Parade-

ise (1990: 2) believe that “the words Sophism and rhetoric designate notions that are suf-

ficiently close to each other for us to advance the following proposition: marketing is the

bureaucratic form of Sophism”.

The ineliminable function of rhetoric in democratic political communication rais-

es exceptions and doubts about the heuristic and programmatic claims of deliberative

democracy theories. As noted by Fontana, Nederman, and Remer

[g]iven the emphasis on the discursive and historical dimension of democracy, it is surprising that commentators have almost universally failed to consider the po-tential contributions of the history of rhetorical theory and practice to the under-standing of democratic processes (Fontana / Nederman / Remer 2004: 2).

Fontana, Nederman, and Remer suggest a rhetorical turn to remedy “unwillingness and

inability to take into account the rhetorical dimension of expression, a point which has

often been recognized and analyzed by earlier thinkers in the history of classical and Eu-

ropean political philosophy” (ibid.). Entering partially this debate, this paper focuses on

the impact of political marketing on democratic legitimation processes, considering the

political marketing as a complication in the history of rhetorical practices.

Nowadays it is the colonization of political campaigning and communication by

marketing (Wring 1999) that requires us to question our understanding of the gap be-

tween observed procedures and idealized conceptions of democratic legitimacy. We are

faced with a chiasmus-structure dilemma: fully rational consensus based on free speech

seems to be ideally legitimating, but impossible; consensus ‘manufactured’ through de-

ceptive marketing or propaganda techniques seems to be even unavoidable, but not fully

legitimating.

One can refer to the concept of ‘consensus’ what Schattschneider (1960: 131-

132) wrote at the very beginning of the televised politics era: “it is impossible to recon-

3 Lakoff's writings, though very challenging, do not treat with respect the history of philosophy, that is not reducible to the ‘traditional conception’ of a “supposedly literal, rational, issueoriented discourse” (Lakoff 2002: 387). Indeed, such a conception is far from being prevalent.

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cile traditional concepts of what ought to happen in a democracy with the fact that an

amazingly large number of people do not seem to know very much about what is going

on”.

Political marketing prescriptions are based on the idea that a typical voter neither

conforms to “standards prescribed by classical liberal theories of democracy (e.g., Jeremy

Bentham, John Mill or John Stuart Mill)” (Steger et al. 2006: 4), nor is a Rawlsian or Ha-

bermasian being capable of discourse and rational consensus. Glancing over titles of po-

litical marketing books, we chance to read that political consultants are changing elec-

tions (Dulio 2004) and reshaping American democracy (Johnson 2001): from this it fol-

lows that “there are important normative issues raised by the role of political profession-

als who exist ‘between those who seek power and those who bestow authority’ (Kelley

1956: 3)” (Steger et al. 2006: 3).

In the following section I will briefly outline some recurring issues in political

marketing studies, placing them in a background that includes the first writings about

public opinion and propaganda. Then I will focus on Habermas’s and Rawls’s theoretical

proposals, trying to set up a comparison between political marketing prescriptions and a

general model of legitimacy, based on ideally rational or reasonable consensus. In con-

clusion, I will argue that political theory needs a “realistic turn” to investigate the histori-

cally and actually legitimizing processes, in order to deal with the gap emerging from the

above-mentioned comparison.

2. From propaganda techniques to political marketing.

Although the American Association of Political Consultants counts Cicero and Machia-

velli among its ideal fathers, it is usually admitted that professional political consulting

was born in California in 1933, thanks to the Campaign Inc. of Clem Whitaker and Leone

Baxter (Cartea/Johnson-Copeland 1997: 2). At that time, the debate concerning the politi-

cal use of propaganda techniques had already begun, as evidenced by Lasswell’s essay on

Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927). After the World War, Lasswell re-

solved to analyze the recent phenomenon of mass persuasion through the media in an

atomized world, assuming that seduction techniques had become a necessity, to compen-

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sate the decline of the cohesive function exercised in the past by love, honor, and ob-

edience. John Dewey’s book entitled The Public and its Problems was also published in

the same year. Two years before, Lippmann (1925) had argued that public is a phantom,

denouncing the mass public ignorance as well as the fact that the average voter is incapa-

ble of governance. Without assenting to the Lippmann’s elitist turn, Dewey took note of

the fact that the idea of an ‘omnicompetent’ citizen is an illusion, and that the intrusion of

powerful private interest in politics would undermines the accountability which is re-

quired in democracy. Nevertheless, Dewey kept on hoping for a more thoroughgoing

education of citizens.

Without going into details, Table 1 gives an overview of the main mechanisms

involved in the forming consensus and currents of opinion, according to studies that did

not yet refer to the notion of ‘political marketing’. Such overview is thought up as means

to consider synoptically factual dynamics and boundaries of political consensus under

conditions of mass democracy. What theories of democracy should not undervalue is that

contemporary politicians are adopting models such as the following ones, in order to

communicate effectively through mass media. It goes without saying that the following

factual dynamics and conditions are largely antithetical to the counterfactual (ideal) con-

ditions postulated by deliberative democratic theorists.

Table 1. Propaganda Techniques

Propaganda Techniques Authors

Repetition, contagion (of ideas, sentiments, emotions and belief), sug-gestion

Le Bon (1895)

Diffusion of the fame of individual leaders among the masses, by means of the Press

Michels (1912/1959)

Identification, gregariousness, libido, projection of the Ego in an ‘Ego ideal’

Freud (1921)

Insertion of a pseudo-environment between man and his environment; deliberate overemphasizing of differences among conflicting parties; dissemination of partial and likely narratives about facts

Lippmann (1922)

Seduction, demonization of the enemy Lasswell (1927)

Use of public relations “to regiment public mind”; researches on public opinion; use of messages packaged according to the surveyed expecta-tions; manipulation

Bernays (1928)

Name calling (“giving an idea a bad label”), glittering generality (“asso- Institute for

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ciating something with a “virtue word”), transfer (carrying “the authori-ty, sanction, and prestige of something respected and revered over to something else in order to make the latter acceptable”), testimonial (“having some respected or hated person say that a given idea or pro-gram or product or person is good or bad”), plain folks (“the method by which a speaker attempts to convince his audience that he and his ideas are good because they are ‘of the people’”), card stacking (“involves the selection and use of facts or falsehoods, illustrations or distractions, and logical or illogical statements in order to give the best or the worst poss-ible case for an idea, program, person, or product”), band wagon (when “the propagandist attempts to convince us that all members of a group to which we belong are accepting his program and that we must therefore follow our crowd”) (Dobb 1949: 285-286)

Propaganda Analysis (1937)4; Lee/ Lee (1939)

Accompanying words with significant and striking gestures or actions; clever use of exaggeration; differentiation of the message in relation to different audience; centralized direction of the Publicity; availability of financial resources; social demagoguery; identification of an “enemy” and construction of group identity on the opposition with that enemy; use of bluff and dissimulation; communication through symbols and slogans; preparation of groups and activities to support communication campaigns

Ciacotin (1939).

Political use of new political myths, “artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans”

Cassirer (1946)

Political polls and data processing Doob (1949)

Image building; use of the insights gleaned from psychiatry, psychoana-lysis and the social sciences, to channel unthinking habits and decision; symbols manipulation (conceived as necessary in a free society) by pro-fessional symbols manipulators

Packard (1958)

Iteration, deletion, rationalization (propaganda is neither true nor false) Huxley (1958)

Use of stereotypes, substitution of names (influencing audience “by substituting favourable or unfavourable terms, with an emotional conno-tation, for neutral ones”), selection, downright lying, repetition, asser-tion, pinpointing the Enemy, appeal to authority

Brown (1963)

The mixture of political communication and advertising techniques became more and

more evident during the Sixties, partly because of the role taken on by television in elec-

toral campaigning. The first television debate between Kennedy and Nixon (1960)

marked an epoch. In 1968, Guy Debord pointed out that political communication was

4 Doob (1949: 285): “The Institute for Propaganda Analysis in the United States was financed in large part by the philanthropist Edward A. Filene, was sponsored and directed by various individuals attached to academic institutions (including this writer), and was operated largely by journalists. It began functioning in October 1937, and disappeared deliberately right before this country entered the last war”.

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adapting itself to the ‘spectacle’ frames and codes, meaning by ‘spectacle’ a “social rela-

tion mediated by images”, where “images become real beings”. According to Debord, in

the society of the spectacle what is not spectacular does not succeed in gaining attention

and audience: in such a society, citizens become nothing but spectators5.

The expressions ‘political marketing’ and ‘electoral marketing’ appeared during

the Eighties, as well as the expression ‘spin doctoring’, which gave a new connotation to

professional political consulting. A spin-doctor is a communication professional able to

manage politician’s images and messages through different media: with other words, a

spin-doctor has to be able to spin images and messages, as well as a pitcher has to be able

to screw the ball.

Electoral marketing designates an important subset of political marketing, be-

cause “voting is at the heart of democracy” (Boiney/Paletz 1991: 3). However, since 1980

– close to the publication of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action – Sydney

Blumenthal identified the trend towards permanent campaign, that is the uninterrupted

adoption of campaigning-like communication in non-electoral periods. Although there are

controversies about the actual impact of campaigns on outcome of elections in different

contexts, there is a broad consensus in acknowledging the role of campaigns in refresh-

ing, reinvigorating, and reunifying partisan preferences, as well as in identifying and mo-

bilizing supporters (Campbell 2000; Steger et al. 2006). Reviewing several studies on key

factors influencing decisions to vote, Boiney and Paletz (1991: 3) identified five recurring

elements, that appear influential on the formation of consensus: partisan identification,

candidate issue positions, candidate image, voter group membership, and retrospective

voting6.

Spin doctors and political marketing consultants aim either at activating potential

voters’ groups or at deactivating potentially rival voters’ groups by means of likely narra-

tives, promises, negative and positive prophecies, mainly appealing to voters’ emotions

(first and foremost fear and enthusiasm). Following political marketing precepts and try-

ing to gain an advantage over another, politicians heighten deliberately struggles and con-

flicts in order to become and appear different.

5 Vedi anche Iyengar (1991) on how television frames political issues, imposing short statements, repetition of slogans and catchy formulas (sound bites), and the predisposition to the so-called ‘horse-race’ setting. 6 Newman/Perloff (2004: 19) notice that “significant strides have been made to integrate the literature in the social sciences with marketing thought on the subject of voter behavior”. According to a model proposed by Newman, “there are five distinct and separate cognitive domains that drive voters’ behavior”: political issues,

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Table 2. Political Marketing Techniques

Political Marketing Techniques

How to

BR

AN

DIN

G

IMA

GE B

UILD

ING

Target and context analysis

Opinion polls (citizens’ attitudes, beliefs, expecta-tions); Benchmarking surveys

(Electoral) market segmentation

Distinguishing citizens groups on the basis of rele-vant factors (age, gender, interests, qualifications, geographical area, and so forth)

Candidate or party “packaging” and “posi-tioning”

Candidate/Party positioning, taking into account the alternative positioning of their opponents (“an op-ponent may take positions designed to deactivate groups that would otherwise support a candidate” (Bishin 2009: 34); styling and restyling of party symbols, identification of favorable issues, and so forth – “it is important not only emphasize one’s own issue, but to position oneself on other issues in the most advantageous manner” (Medvic 2006: 23)

Media and News Man-agement

Press releases (article marketing); video clips; press conferences; interviews. Choosing the media, get-ting the timing of the advertisement right

Communication Tech-niques / Propaganda Techniques

Plain Folks, Band Wagon, appeals to pride and identity; use of stereotypes; slogan and jingle (sound bites)

Publicity/Advertising Image building; inventing narratives; event spon-sorship; gadget marketing; buzz and word-of-mouth advertising; negative advertising (mud-slinging, blame shift), and so forth

Nonverbal Image building

Photo retouching; make-up; gestures control; ban-ners; music; clothing; hairstyles, and so forth

social imagery, candidate personality, situational contingency, epistemic value. The fifth factor “represents that dimension that appeals to a voter’s sense of curiosity or novelty in choosing a candidate” (ibid., 20).

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3. Habermas and Rawls on idealized consensus.

In response to criticism of his Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas (1982:

264) reaffirmed that communicatively achieved agreement is “based on the intersubjec-

tive recognition of criticisable validity-claims – however merely implicit this may be”.

More specifically, in Habermas’s view one should not speak of agreement when “at least

one of the participants is deceiving the other(s) regarding the non-fulfillment of the condi-

tions of communicative action which he or she apparently accepted” (ibid.). In such cas-

es, one should rather speak of manipulation and latently strategic interaction. The follow-

ing table 3 shows Habermas’s distinction between strategic and communicative action:

Table 3. Action and Actor in Habermas’s view Actor

Action Orientated to success Orientated to reaching un-

derstanding

Non-social Instrumental action -

Social Strategic action Communicative action

Political marketing and advertising, as well as the persuasion techniques exposed in

Greek treatises on rhetoric and commonly used by Sophists, do not meet Habermas’s cri-

teria for communicatively achieved agreement.

Habermas (1975; 1979) takes into account the complex interactions among economic,

political and socio-cultural sub-systems in contemporary advanced capitalism, and he is

aware that understanding through rationally motivating achievements and good justifica-

tions, “[…] is located in the idealizations built into communicative action” (Habermas

1982: 223). Habermas himself adds that “(a) we can also act in a non-communicative

manner and (b) the ineluctability of idealizing suppositions does not imply that these will

in fact be fulfilled” (ibid., 228-229).

Here is the problem: with respect to (a), one has a lot of reasons to say that we nor-

mally act in a non Habermasian manner, and even that we cannot act in the Habermasian

communicative manner in the strict sense. According to Habermas (1989, 2006: 103-

104), “public opinion, in terms of its very idea, can be formed only if a public that engag-

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es in rational discussion exists”: taking such requirement seriously, one has to admit that

we live “in a climate of non public opinion” (ibid. 106).

As a matter of fact, it seems that there is an insurmountable gap between usual politi-

cal and social practices on the one hand, and what could be agreed upon by rational sub-

jects starting from idealized positions, on the other hand. Habermas’s theory of commu-

nicative action is not a description of what happens, but a theory about what ought to

happen, presuming that human being are interested in understanding each other, in join-

ing in common activity, and in removing distortions, fraud, and deceptions in their under-

standing of themselves. Simone Chambers (1995: 233) observes that “Habermas has al-

ways implied that discourse ethics contains or leads to a theory of democratic legitima-

tion”: “one way to understand the shift from moral theory to political theory – writes

Chambers (1995, 235) – is to say that rather than a reformulated version of the categorical

imperative, discourse ethics represent a reformulated version of Kant’s principle of pub-

licity”7. According to Chevigny (2000: 314), “we can use the proceduralist model as a

normative ideal to mount a critique of the ways that existing governments fall short of

democratic will-formation”.

The pervasiveness of political marketing and advertising goes by an antithetic concep-

tion of human understanding and puts Habermas’s general presumptions about human be-

ings in doubt. He is aware that we live in a world where publicity is mostly conceived as a

synonymous of advertising. In the Habermas’s eyes too, the open question is about the

way of conceiving a public sphere, whose publicity is not colonized by deceptive commu-

nication, advertising and political marketing techniques. Habermas’s Between Facts and

Norms (1996) deals exactly with this problem: if legitimacy is based upon the assent of

all citizens involved in a discursive process, and if legitimate laws derive in the strict

sense from discursive tests and fair bargaining processes (under certain conditions), what

kind of legitimacy can derive from consensus mediated by mass media and advertising

techniques?

Habermas’s awareness of the insurmountable gap between “strong communicative ac-

tion” (Habermas 1998) and actual (impure) communicative situations coexists with a

strong cognitive presumption, according to which we should open a divarication between

rationally motivated agreement and emotionally conditioned persuasion. Such a distinc-

7 “The theory of democratic legitimacy that emerges from this analysis is one in which citizens are called upon to collectively and critically evaluate the institutions and norms of their society through the procedures of discourse” (ibid., p. 240)

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tion between ration and emotion does not help us to talk about real individuals: it wea-

kens the heuristic and programmatic value of the Habermasian model, instead. Excessive

counterfactual presumptions lower the power of ideal model to make friction over reality.

One can maintain that this is a critical challenge for political (constitutional) imagination,

without sharing Habermas’s idealizations about communicative action.

In John Rawls’s contractarian approach, “the idea of the original position is to set up a

fair procedure so that any principles agreed to will be just” (Rawls 1971: 136). The origi-

nal position is imagined as if the participants were contracting from behind a veil of ig-

norance, which is a theoretical expedient to let emerge the basic intuitions that could be

chosen by rational subjects compelled to impartiality.

The basic question is: how would free and equal citizens come to an agreement and

consent under fair conditions, from behind a veil of ignorance? Answering this question,

Rawls’s thought experiment of the original position aims at finding some principles and

terms of cooperation, in order to reform our non-ideal world. Paradoxically, passing from

the original position to our societies, individuals have to come to an agreement and to de-

cide from behind quite another veil of ignorance: bound in many different ways by their

cultural, social and economic limits and conditions, individuals do not know their future

conditions and act from behind the veil that propaganda professionals spread out. Al-

though we have to take decisions from behind such double veil of ignorance, we do not

act as Rawlsian creatures.

In later works, the focus of Rawls’s thought moves from rational agreement to reason-

able consensus. Rawls (1987; 1989; 2001) introduces the notion of overlapping consen-

sus, “to make the idea of a well-ordered society more realistic” (Rawls 2001: 32). Over-

lapping consensus, which is thought of as “the most reasonable basis” for a well-ordered

society, is the consensus of reasonable citizens, interested in reaching a shared point of

view on how a society has to be well-ordered. More specifically, from Rawls’s point of

view, one has to speak of “overlapping consensus” when reasonable citizens discuss con-

troversial issues in real contexts: that is, not from behind an imaginary veil of ignorance,

but “from within different and opposing comprehensive doctrines” (ibid.). According to

Rawls, reasonable pluralism and overlapping consensus are necessary conditions for a

reasonably just and workable constitutional democracy.

Extracting some basic points from Habermas’s and Rawls’s writings – without imply-

ing that their views are coincident or complementary – we can compare a general concep-

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tion of idealized consensus with the predominant assumptions in the field of contempo-

rary political marketing:

Table 3. Consensus

CONSENSUS

Idealized consensus Emotional Appeal, Marketing/Advertising Techniques

Rational/reasonable and autonomous subjects, capable of discourse, interested in mutual un-derstanding

ACTORS Embodied rational-emotional minds, with different attitudes, in-terests, points of view, unconscious thought and desires

Public sphere WHERE Complex media system with gatekeepers

Prevalence of better argument. Appeal to ratio-nality or reasonableness. Making explicit and giving reasons. Justifying and exhibiting rea-sons. Shared interest in reaching overlapping consensus among antithetic points of views. Absence of fraud, deception, influence based on power or money drops.

HOW - TECHNIQUES

Prevalence of images. Appeal to emotional adhesion (hope, fear, enthusiasm, and so forth). Intentionally partial framing of is-sues. Strategic mixture of logical and illogical arguments. “Power-making by image-making” (Castells 2009, 193)8. Propagan-da Techniques. Market-ing Techniques. Nega-tive advertising. Lan-guage tricks. Mud slinging, Muck raking. And so forth

Truthful and fair assertions, reasonable argu-ments

TYPICAL SPEECH ACTS

Allusions, threats, promises, accusations, slogans, rising expecta-tions

Full legitimation through/based on discourse Legitimation through voting

8 Castells (2009: 193): “[…] power relationships are largely based on the shaping of the human mind by the construction of meaning through image-making”.

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4. Consensus and overlapping expectations: some conclusive remarks

Habermas places himself between the liberal models of democracy, according to which

“the democratic process takes place exclusively in the form of compromises between

competing interests” (Habermas 1994: 6), and the “ethical overload” of the communita-

rian paradigm, that requires a “collective identity” grounded on shared conceptions of

common good. Nevertheless, Habermas himself proposes a deliberative democracy model

characterised by a sort of ethical and counterfactuality overload. His and other delibera-

tive models appear to demanding and narrow9, and Bohman (2000: 15) goes as far as ar-

guing that “a stronger practical conception of deliberative democracy can be had by reex-

amining the normative idealizations and assumptions of some deliberative theories”.

Let us go back to our initial question about the relationship between consensus and

democratic legitimation in the political marketing era. Rising a direct question on ethical

implications of political marketing for democracy, Cwalina, Falkowski and Newman

point out a paradoxical situation:

The foundation of democratic societies is their citizens’ freedom, which helps to create more and more sophisticated marketing strategies whose goal is to make the voter vote for a certain political option. We face then a paradoxical situation because a side product of these strategies is the limitation of the voter’s choice in voting deci-sions (Cwalina et al. 2009: 76).

Such limitations, that “come from inside”, are the most insidious because citizens do

not realize that they are being limited in their freedom. Cwalina, Falkowski and Newman

add that political marketing can influence voter’s decision “through creating in one’s

mind a certain picture of a part of reality, stimulating certain behaviors” (ibid). Recalling

the Lippmann’s theme of the ‘pseudo-ambient’, this remark attests that political market-

ing and advertising look on citizens as influencable spectators. Our knowledge of the

facts is necessarily incomplete and, strictly speaking, what we know depends on the in-

terpretative frame we adopt: this being the case, political marketing and advertising are a

set of techniques designed to invent and spread interpretative frames and deliberately par-

tial versions of the facts. But there is a different points of view, which shows unexpected

implications of the political marketing:

9 In more general terms, Gabardi (2001: 556) writes that “the deliberative model of democracy is too demanding, to narrow, and to coercive”.

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[…], political marketing is not only limited to the activities taken up by politicians and political parties during elections. It can and should be used to establish, maintain and enhance relationships between the ruling and various social groups: “ordinary” citizens, non-governmental organizations, lobbyists and other politicians and political parties. And this can be achieved by a mutual exchange and fulfillment of promises (Cwalina et al. 2009: 76-77).

This view, according to which marketing techniques allow to generate sensitivity to

voters’ needs and wishes, overshadows the fact that a good political marketing strategist

can get paid to pass off unfulfilled promises as fulfilled ones. Suggesting that “fulfillment

of promises” functions as a marketing lever, and substituting ‘consumer’ with ‘citizen’ in

expressions like ‘customer-oriented marketing’ and ‘customer relationship management’,

some apologists of political marketing go so far as to argue that marketing techniques

could increase the legitimacy of democratic institutions around the world. Within this

complex scenario of antithetical claims, the temptation to resort the epistemic fallacy of

‘essentialism’ (Fuchs 2001) about legitimation involves the attempt to disprove the apo-

logetics of marketing applied to politics.

Laufer and Paradeise (1990) observe that post-modern society is characterized by the

weakening of the traditional sources of legitimacy. If Sophism and marketing become

more and more influential as techniques of power and domination, the following question

arises: “Can Sophism and marketing, these two techniques of power and domination,

claim affinity with one of the types of legitimacy identified by Max Weber?” (Lau-

fer/Paradeise 1990: 13).

According to Laufer and Paradeise:

Although Sophism and marketing do not belong to any of the identified forms of legitimacy, they at least possess attributes of each of these forms. With charisma, they at least possess attributes of each of these forms. With charisma, they share the attribute of emotional adhesion. If “no prophet has ever regarded his status as being dependent on the opinion that the crowd has of him”, no product of marketing or Sophism has virtues independent of the opinions of the crowd. Whereas adhesion to the charismatic leader is spontaneous, adhesion to the product of marketing is con-structed; whereas every word of the charismatic leader meets with immediate adhesion because it is his word, the Sophist and the marketing man seek to transfer the adhesion of the public, aroused by the evocation of word and ideas, to the person or the product that they wish to sell (Laufer/Paradeise 1990: 13-14).

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Maintaining the distinction between fact and value, and the correlated idea that social

sciences must be value-free, Max Weber (1978: 31) argued that a social and political or-

der is de facto legitimate when it is believed to be legitimate. By locating the validity of

legitimacy (Legitimitätsgeltung) in the changing panorama of beliefs and expectations,

Weber gave a characteristic twist to the problem of the nexus between consensus and le-

gitimation. Following Weber (1978: 328), one has to distinguish among: (a) “the factually

wide currency, in the environment, of the subjective beliefs in the objective validity of

some norms (consensus)”; (b) “the existence of conventional guaranty, through regard for

social approval or disapproval”; (c) “the existence of legal guaranty through the existence

of enforcement machinery”. In more general terms, the wide currency of overlapping sub-

jective beliefs involves the emergence of consensus as Chance of overlap of expecta-

tions10.

In Weberian terms, social action may be oriented in four ways (Weber 1978: 24-25):

instrumentally rational (zweckrational), value-rational (wert-rational) affectual (especial-

ly emotional) and traditional. In everyday life, these elements overlap and intertwine:

Submission to an order is almost always determined by a variety of interests and by a mixture of adherence to tradition and belief in legality, unless it is a case of entirely new regulations. In a very large proportion of cases, the actors subject to the order are of course not even aware how far it is a matter of custom, of convention, or of law. In such cases the sociologist must attempt to formulate the typical basis of validity (We-ber 1978: 37-38).

Belief is a variety of assent controlled by rational and irrational factors. According to

Weber’s tripartite typology, political power and authority can be legitimated by suffi-

ciently shared beliefs (1) in the legitimation role of a given tradition, (2) in the rational

legality of a political order or (3) in a charismatic ruler. The formation of belief must be

considered in relation to conducts of life. Conducts of life evolve and are not fully con-

scious. Adopting a Weberian point of view about legitimacy, one should stress that prop-

aganda techniques and political marketing aim to generate and direct voter’s beliefs;

from this it follows that, given the weakening of the traditional sources of legitimation,

political propaganda and marketing carry out the compensatory function to deliver legiti-

macy by trying to induce beliefs about legitimacy.

10 Note that “from the point of view of sociology, the transitions from mere usage to convention and from it to law are fluid” (Weber 1978: 325).

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This means, as pointed out by Castells (2009), that communication power generates

and allocates political power. In such conditions it is impossible to draw a clear dividing

line between coercion and voluntary agreement. Insofar as the vote decides the distribu-

tion of power, communication management focuses on getting votes: references to tradi-

tion, rationality and charismatic leadership are nothing but potential ingredients in this

complex task.

Renouncing to the temptation of an ‘essentialist’ view about legitimation does not

mean that one has to give up imagining procedures that may be better than the existent

ones. In Weberian terms, this exercise of the imagination and the correlated choices

should be made politically. Following Weber, we can adopt coherence and accountability

as demarcation criteria: the widespread adoption of political marketing as mean of com-

pensatory legitimation, in fact, raises issues of coherence and accountability because –

for example – politicians usually try to legitimize themselves by appealing to their own

‘truthfulness’, while marketing is about inventing and packaging partial versions about

the facts.

Taking into account what sociological studies tell us about the effects of political mar-

keting and mass media communication, political theory needs to rethink democratic insti-

tutions and rules, looking at what spin doctors and marketers actually do, more than at

what rational contractors would do under ideal conditions: more specifically, political

theory needs to look at what spin doctors and marketers do, in order to mitigate or contain

the pseudo-democratic effects of political marketing, which often lead to a ‘pseudo-

consensus’ (consensus without neither awareness nor argumentation). Deliberative de-

mocracy theories and contemporary theories of idealized consensus give a general outline

of counterfactual (ideal) conditions that political communication (public discourse, col-

lective public deliberation) should measure up to or at least approximately satisfy, but of-

ten fail in making friction over reality. The following question arises: could such idea-

lized models be modified in order to meet the discussed empirical conditions?11

Answering this question will clarify our approach to the gap between ideality and real-

ity and thus make it easier for us to define the necessary relationship between reality

analysis and utopian ideas, when considering whether and how actual democracies should

reach a higher degree of democraticity. Once we admit and understand the actual function

of political marketing, we can start to discuss how to correct discursive distortions and

11 Thanks to reviewers for their comments and questions on this point.

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programmatic incoherencies induced by intentionally strategic communication. Public

sphere neither is nor will be ‘transparent’. Antitrust laws and media regulation are both

necessary and insufficient to curb political marketing effects: a political theory which

aims to improve the quality of political communication should start focusing on usual

communicative interactions among unequal citizens, and on which sort of rights and edu-

cation could enable real citizens to recognize political marketing tricks. This ability is

crucial now more than ever, because we are witnessing the seemingly irreversible spread

of political marketing and spin doctoring. Most citizens are unaware of what political

marketing professionals do. Most citizens neither are prepared nor have the opportunity

to participate in deliberative processes. We have no evidence to the contrary until now.

Reykowski (2006) presents an empirical research according to which “it is possible to

conduct a debate on ideologically contentious issues that meets some criteria of delibera-

tive functioning and that such a debate may have some of the effects postulated by deli-

berative theorists” (Reykowski 2006: 342). Nevertheless, what the research shows is that

“deliberative norms of mutual interaction can in fact be adopted” in the protected envi-

ronment of facilitated debates on specific issues: this may happen “under certain condi-

tions” and “to a certain extent”.

In mass-medial societies highly emotional appeals and short sound bites are likely to

engage the emotional system of the brain, influencing on cognition and decisions, while a

highly discursive approach would probably lose interest from audience. Different impacts

of advertising and propaganda techniques across citizens can be due to either different

cultural competences or due to an intensively engaged but variable across individuals po-

litical partisanship: nevertheless, the fact that political consultants, pollsters, political

marketing professionals, and spin doctors are able to orchestrate the reaction of so many

voters, warns political theorists about the fact that we do not live in a world full of ration-

al individuals prepared to argumentative deliberation. Idealized models of consensus can

help us to develop a conception of worth living democracy, characterised by a high de-

gree of political participation and democraticity: nevertheless, political theory needs a

“realistic turn” – inspired by Max Weber among others – to investigate the historically

and actually legitimizing processes. The study of political marketing techniques is an ex-

ample of realistic turn, which allow us to recognize citizens’ cognitive limits and question

the possibility of effecting the education for argumentative deliberation which delibera-

tive democracy theorists always assume done somewhere.

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Consensus and Democratic Legitimacy: Political Marketing versus Political Philosophy

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