Political Science
My favourite political websites and blogs (in no particular order)
I’ll come back and tidy up this list on a regular basis đ
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/mumble/
http://www.stephen-mills.com.au/
http://mikesmithonline.wordpress.com/
http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/
A workshop on campaign management and political marketing
If you’ve read my earlier (now slightly dated) literature review or discussed political campaigning with me over a few beers (I apologise for everything I said after the third beer) you’ll know I often lament about the relative lack of professional and academic interest in political campaign training in Australia. Well it’s clear I’m not the only one, because this week in Sydney there’ll be an inaugural event that brings many academics and practitioners together to discuss this very thing!
Check out the website: http://www.cmpm2014.org/Â for “The 2014 Australia New Zealand WORKSHOP ON CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT & POLITICAL MARKETING”. As far as I know registration is open to all those with an interest in this field, academic or otherwise.
As the website explains: “In 2014, the University of Sydneyâs Graduate School of Government will play host to the second Australia-New Zealand Workshop on Campaign Management and Political Marketing. The workshop will bring together academics and practitioners for an in-depth discussion of current and emerging trends in campaign management and political marketing, and generate new networks and opportunities for further trans-Tasman and international research. The workshop will particularly focus on the intersection between research and practice, and is open to academics, party representatives, political consultants, research students and civil society campaigners.”
As well as a series of panels and discussions about many aspects of campaigning the highlights will include some discussion of Stephen Mill’s new book The Professionals: Strategy, Money and the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia I haven’t read the book yet, but if it’s anywhere near as good as his brilliant 1986 book “The New Machine Men” I will probably read it a few times and ask him a few questions about it afterwards! đ
Stephen has been busy promoting his book in the media recently. Here are some links to recent articles and interviews:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/the-rise-of-political-campaigners/5585274
Here’s a short summary:
Political polling, door-knocking, the targeting of marginal seats and swinging voters. Theyâre terms all Australians are now very familiar with as elections continually roll around. But that wasnât always the case. Academic and author Stephen Mills examines how politics in Australia has been shaped and influenced in the newly published The Professionals: Strategy, Money and the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia.
That’s not Stephen, it’s Liberal Party National Director Mr Brian Loughnane, one of the many interviewees featured in Stephen’s new book. Do yourself a favour and buy it.
If you want to see what Stephen looks like and learn more about his amazing work then you should check out his website! http://www.stephen-mills.com.au/
The Literature Review Part 6 – Three American Campaign texts, Conclusion, Biography
Three American Campaign texts and their local relevance
Three recent American books on campaigning and political marketing have been rated for relevance to Australian practice. They are assessed from the perspective of a candidate or campaign director/manager for an Australian federal or state electorate. The final test is whether the American text is more or less useful than a 1990 book by former minister Barry Cohen which was written in jest as much as instruction How to become Prime Minister, for all aspiring politicians (and the people who have to vote for them). There are at least two chapters that would serve as a dated but helpful campaign handbook to budding politicians and campaign directors who do not have the benefit of party training and manuals.
Of the American books, time is short so letâs select three easily purchased examples to look at in detail: Bruce Newmanâs The Marketing of the President: political marketing as campaign strategy, Dennis Johnsonâs No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants Are Reshaping American Democracy, and Sheaâs Campaign craft : the strategies, tactics, and art of political campaign management.
The first famous book on political campaigning is Bruce Newmanâs The Marketing of the President: political marketing as campaign strategy. The title might seem interesting to an Australian campaigner who doesnât have much political experience, however a quick look at the contents page reveals little detail that would apply to an Australian federal or state election. Written in 1994, itâs clearly not a âhow toâ book for campaigning novices and reads more like an academic text about political marketing theory, with a few insights and examples from presidential campaigns in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Some of the more useful information provided from an Australian perspective is an explanation of the modern challenges facing candidates and parties in the appropriately titled second chapter The Shifting Winds of Politics in which brief explanations are provided for: relationship marketing, increasing campaign expenses, voter fragmentation and sophistication; how campaigning has superseded the old party structures and loyalties, the power of modern media in political campaigns, candidate selection pitfalls and how (in the view of the authors) marketing concepts have superseded party concepts in modern campaigning; Overall a useful chapter to an inexperienced student of campaign strategy, but of little practical instruction to an Australian candidate or campaign director. Chapter Three focuses on various trends in computers, TV, direct mail, US party structures and US primary/convention rules, US financial regulations, presidential debate formats, candidate philosophy, the value of consultants, pollsters, the media, parties, political action committees (PACs) and other interest groups and, last but not least, voters. All descriptions of trends and groups are treated with a distinct US-centric flavour that makes most of the content very hard to translate if there isnât an existing familiarity with the US system and clear understanding of how it differs from the Australian context. The next Chapter is even more disappointing from an Australian campaigning perspective as it is titled but is in fact a detailed account of the strategies used to segment various interest groups by presidential candidates in each partyâs primary season. Although US primaries have been compared to Australian preselections they are in practice very different due to a number of factors such as the ability of non-party-members to vote, the subsequent use of mass media to sway voters and national organised efforts in the case of presidential primaries. After only three chapters this text is clearly not up to basic standards of relevance for modern campaigns in Australia. Compared to the Cohen book, itâs not much practical use to an Australian campaigner or candidate and much less entertaining.
One useful insight from the 1994 book by Newman is the damage that Ross Perotâs candidacy caused Bush snr as Perot, a conservative independent, detracted from Bushâs conservative message and appeal. The Greenâs Ralph Nader caused Al Gore similar grief in 2000. One could argue that the federal âcompulsory preferentialâ ballot in Australia minimises the destructive power of third party candidates, but Hansonâs One Nation had a similarly destructive, though temporary, effect on Liberal votes in 1998, and particularly in the subsequent Queensland state election, in which the ballot was âoptional preferentialâ.
Newmanâs 1999 book The Mass Marketing of Politics: Democracy in an Age of Manufactured Images updates much of the concepts and examples of his previous text but reads like a critique of modern politics and would not be recommended reading for candidates or inexperienced campaign directors less they lose all motivation for politics. The opening sentence in the preface is âThe Mass Marketing of Politics makes it very clear why our democracy is on shaky groundâ! Newman outlines that his main motivation in writing the book âis to help educate an American electorate that is very frustrated that is very frustrated with the state of its political affairsâ. But for those interested in the strategies behind American presidential campaigns, chapter 5 is a âmust-readâ. Although there is no juicy detail that would suggest he is an evil genius, Richard Wirthlin, Reaganâs pollster, also gets a mention. Thatâs the same Wirthlin that was such an inspiration to Mark Textor in subsequent years. Chapter 6, The Art of Crafting An Image is one of the few really big improvements on the earlier book, as it provides practical advice on the importance of perception and emotional connections in politics. A very amusing (but insightful) anecdote at the end of the book relates to the 1998 election, where former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota. During Venturaâs campaign, âone ad depicted two boys playing with an action figure that had a shaved head and bulging muscles ripping through the seams of a dark suit. One of the boys bangs the dollâs fist on a desk, railing against Evil Special Interest Manâ. A campaign novelty, the doll actually went on sale soon after the election, with proceeds split between charity and future campaigns. Now thereâs a lesson in marketing for Australian political aspirants!
I would have liked to assess Newmanâs famous (and relatively expensive) Handbook of Political Marketing but it is not available for purchase in Australia and the order (via Amazon) has taken a particularly longer time than hoped. Appraisal of it will be included in the updated notes for the thesis. The fact that it is out of print and hard to find probably makes assessment irrelevant from the perspective of a practical text for campaigning in Australia.
The second book assessed in some detail is Dennis Johnsonâs No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants Are Reshaping American Democracy. The copy I have was printed (2nd edition) in 2001. The cover has a quote from James Carville, Clintonâs famous campaign director and star of the political documentary The War Room. From an Australian perspective itâs better than Barry Cohenâs book, both as a campaign manual and as a well-written book. The book is so well-written that an Australian with the barest understanding of politics can pick it up and without any previous knowledge of the US political processes and follow his detailed explanations. The introduction is particularly good, explaining how the US âis the land of electionsâ with âapproximately 513,200 popularly elected officialsâ and âover a million elections are held in every four year cycle.â The focus of the book is the professional political consultant, of which there âare about 7,000â assisting with the largest 50,000 campaigns per year. To put this in an Australian perspective (where Party officials and staff undertake the campaign roles normally assigned to professional consultants in the US), there is probably around 50 full-time staff in an Australian federal partyâs campaign headquarters and around 50 contractors working off-site and no more than another 100 or so other full-time staff scattered around various cities â and this heavy concentration of Australian full-time campaign professionals happens about once every three years!
The introduction to this great book continues with an explanation of six categories of campaigns in the US, based on âsize of the electorate, relative importance of the office and degree of involvement of campaign professionalsâ. Of the six, Australian federal elections are probably equivalent (in terms of money and population) to the race for Governor of a medium to large state, (like Pennsylvania, where Democrat Ed Rendell raised and spent US$30million in 2006). What is startling from an Australian perspective is that our federal electorate campaigns, with a typical voting population of around 80-90,000 voters (compared to around 600,000 residents in a US congressional seat), fall into the final, smallest category of elections used by Johnson, which he calls âSmall Electionsâ where consultants are generally not used. He explains that âthese campaigns essentially count on name recognition and face-to-face meetings with voters, and have low-Budget advertising through posters, yard signs and last-minute advertisements in local newspapers.â Welcome to the reality of campaigning in the average Australian suburban federal electorate! Some Australian federal electorates (the twenty most marginal, especially those in regional seats) would fall into the category above: âMedium Sized elections below the state-wide level, usually mayoral elections for cityâs of over 250,000 or state legislative races. âThese elections are being transformed most rapidly from amateur to professional.â
No Place for Amateurs is a how-to guide for political campaigning and is written by an experienced campaigner as it is full of well-written and believable anecdotes which provide clear examples to readers about how to do things correctly or stuff them up when you are working on a campaign. The book explains clearly what political consultants do and how stressful campaigning can be, as well as the technical aspects of research, strategy and planning, polling, media management, targeting voters and raising campaign funds. This inside look at campaign consulting avoids the anti-consultant hysteria of some recent insider books from the US. He also highlights some trouble spots in the US and suggests some reforms. There is now a 2007 (third) edition of Johnsonâs book, which I will try and get and look forward to see which sections have been updated.
Daniel Sheaâs Campaign craft: the strategies, tactics, and art of political campaign management, co-written with Michael Burton, is also now in itâs third edition. This book, from an Australian campaign perspective, is even better than Johnsonâs and if you are interested in learning about nuts and bolts campaign techniques from the US and wanted to buy just one book â this is it. Shea explains in the preface of the 2001 edition that he wrote the book âto help bridge the gap between what scholars understood about modern elections and what campaign operatives knew about the process.â After briefly outlining the history of modern campaigning and explaining the emergence of professional political consultants, the book covers all the fundamentals of any good campaign manual. The first working chapter (two) lays the foundations of any good campaign plan: research and strategy. The following points are quickly covered, all 100% relevant to any political contest in Australia: District profile, demographic profile, candidate and opposition profiles, electoral history, public opinion, general strategy and message, fundraising plan, and traditional grassroots strategies. The writing style is as an instruction manual for a local campaign manager or candidate. There is wise counsel about the importance of good strategy, management and planning, with valuable advice on timing various aspects of the campaign plan for maximum benefit.
All the subsequent chapters elaborate on chapter two, indicating how the overall strategy is essentially made from distinct specialised elements that all relate to each other in a successful campaign. Throughout the text, there are numerous national, state and local examples to illustrate the lessons and help the reader avoid the common mistakes and pitfalls that are part of every election campaign. All the subsequent chapters are written so that each can be read on its own, as a quick lesson in a particular aspect of campaigning. This can prove to be an invaluable aid in training and discussions about specific aspects of campaigns. As with No Place for Amateurs Sheaâs Campaign craft could easily be dissected and applied to a local campaign case study. It would take a great deal of time and would demonstrate that each of thee books present transferable knowledge, not because American and Australian campaign techniques are identical, but because the fundamentals of good campaign management and practice are universal. Such an exercise would be worthwhile because there are no Australian equivalents to these two books. Both Mills and Stockwellâs books cover some of the ground but not in a systematic and comprehensive style that could be used as a manual. Also, both Mills and Stockwell are communications specialists and not campaign strategy and management specialists.
One of the training aids which the author has seen used successfully in political circles is the ABC TV documentary about the 1984 election in the federal seat of Cook, Thatâs Democracy. A worthwhile thesis would be to compare the lessons from the TV documentary e.g. How not to run strategy, planning, fundraising, media, voter contact, publicity, etc and how those essential campaign processes are explained in Sheaâs book.
Last year (2007) A British book appeared which was written by a former Conservative party campaigner Lionel Zetter: The Political Campaigning Handbook. Real life lessons from the front line. Zetterâs book is a reasonably logical how-to guide for running an election in the UK. It does not have the academic robustness of the Shea and Johnson texts but it is practical in its advice and no doubt of use to conservative candidates in UK elections, as well as Australian and American observers of the next UK general election.
Discussion, implications, conclusions, continuing research
Mills wisely states that âAustraliaâs oldest political tradition is borrowing and adaptation: Canberraâs Westminster system is hardly home-grownâ
One can see examples in the available literature of when the required adaptation was carried out successfully, leading to electoral benefits. Itâs a bit harder to find examples of the poor adaptations, as one can point to many factors in any election loss. One of the examples of poor adaptation is the use of automated phone messaging by the Liberal Party, both in 2004 and 2007, as described in an earlier section.
The lesson for Australian political scientists and campaigners is that much of what is written about campaigning techniques in American books and journals must be treated with caution. A lot of techniques have been tried and adapted but few have been tested to the extent that scientific studies in the US would suggest is required to prove their worth beyond dispute.
Thompson concluded that âit would be inappropriate to call Australian politics âAmericanisedâ and âAmerican ideas are Australianised by imprinting onto them the Australian way of doing politics and Australian content. Despite all the American-born influences, Australian politics and its political system remain distinctively and uniquely Australian.â 28 p 121
Plasserâs studies show that the degree of influence of American-style campaign techniques in Australia is very small in comparison to Latin America and Europe. This would suggest a relatively strong integrity in Australian political character relative to many Western-style democracies.
Plasser also identifies Australian trends which run against American ones, such as the well-recognised influence of party-centric campaigning in Australia. This is counter to the parties diminishing relevance for campaign professionals in the US.
There are also arguable examples of campaign techniques that are more ruthless and professional in Australia than in the US or UK. The Australian examples of the National Media Liaison Service (1983-1996) and the Government Members Secretariat (1996-2007) indicate, as Stockwell describes, âa whole of government approach to media management that is fundamentally changing the nexus between politics and the mediaâ, because we âlack the protections of the US First Amendment and the bustling, brawling press of Fleet Streetâ.
In describing the ânew political machine menâ Mills writes âSome regard them with a combination of awe and dismay, the harbingers of a new and expensive Americanism which will do to our parliamentary system what McDonaldâs did to the corner fish and chip shop. Others dismiss them as nasty but temporary fads which our entrenched political traditions will reject like unsuccessful organ transplants.â
The truth, as usual is probably somewhere in between those two extremes.
Mills is correct that American-derived campaign techniques are mostly expensive but they can also save campaigners money if applied correctly. Microtargeting and Robocalls are as much about reducing waste and expenditure through better targeted messaging and more efficient mediums. A robocall can attempt âcontactâ and convey a message to a substantial part of an electorate for much less expense than a TV or radio ad, or a direct mail or professionally letterboxed flyer.
One could argue that the real death knell of the corner fish and chip shop was the ascendency of the European café culture which has gripped the Australian psyche in the last two decades. McDonalds has survived by adapting to it rather than relying on its sheer efficiency and turnover. Starbucks was an example of a direct American import which was itself recently a casualty of our café culture. The analogy is accurate because it stipulates that American-derived campaign techniques must be adapted and localised to be effective.
To some extent all campaign techniques have a waxing and waning popularity and can justifiably be described in one period or another as âfadsâ. But our entrenched political traditions are much more accommodating than the critics have hoped and, if applied, carefully and with sage advice, most campaign techniques, new or old, have some merit. Politics is certainly a profession that believes in the expression âwhat was once old can be new againâ and in many cases the new techniques, compliment, rather than replace, traditional campaigning.
One very interesting aspect of the McAllister 2007 AES is âthe 2007 election was unusual in exhibiting an increase in the use of the traditional mediaâ by voters to obtain electoral information.
McAllisterâs findings support Hugh Mackayâs regular assertion that 2007 marked a âpolitical awakeningâ amongst the Australian population, a turning point which has ended a period of political stability at the federal and state level and started a new period with increased interest and expectations about politics, marked by signs of electoral instability and voter volatility. The 2008 campaigns and elections in the NT, WA, the ACT and various by-elections support this view. Lenore Taylor wrote recently that âHugh Mackay’s latest mind and mood survey, based on focus group surveys across the country, found that people were hankering after a statesmanlike prime minister with big ideas and the courage to back them. Like the one they thought they had voted for last year.â
Mills optimistically states that âAustraliaâs oldest political tradition is borrowing and adaption; Canberraâs Westminster system is hardly home-grown.â And that âlocal practitioners have proven themselves able to master and adapt the import as a creative springboard for local innovations.â He is also optimistic about the durability of our basic political system and its ability to remain a democratic cornerstone. âItâs no use worrying about whether Australian politics is becoming more âpresidentialâ. The fundamental rules of political competition in this country are fixed: prime Ministers, unlike presidents, will always need a majority in the House of Representatives; new campaign practices will neither sharpen nor dull the desire of backbenchers to become Prime Minister; nor of opposition to form Government.â
A book by Dominic Wring (published in 2005) about the evolution of political marketing in the UK Labour Party follows a similar timeline to Millâs descriptions of American influences here. One peculiar aspect of this evolution in the UK is the âpartyâs educationalist ethosâ which favoured education over persuasion as a political objective and âdocumentary film techniques rather than commercial style productionsâ for many decades. Wring is critical of the marketing focus of the Blair years and blames it for a fundamental collapse in recent Labour support in the UK, as the partyâs strategists and campaigners lost sight of the partyâs base in their quest research-based messages and policies primarily targeted at the swinging voter. Similar criticisms have been made of the Australian Labor Party, although without the weight of evidence provided in the UK and the US based on their more widespread use of professional political marketing theory and techniques. Wring concludes that Blair was wrong in his calculation that âa section of his core vote would stay Labour because they had nowhere else to go. The dramatic fall in turnout at the 2001 general election suggested otherwise.â
Even with âcompulsory votingâ, Australia is not immune to dramatic falls in turnout, which have been experienced in Australian by-elections and most recently in the NT election, widely criticised for being called earlier than expected. No doubt further analysis of the underlying causes of drops in voter turnout will explore the influence of increasing voter cynicism towards political marketing and transparent political strategies designed for partisan advantage.
Whether discussing American influence here, important lessons can be learnt from comparative analysis of US campaign techniques and those in other countries, such as Blumlerâs UK studies. One is âto avoid the glib uses of the notion of Americanisation to explain swirling developments in campaign communication in other societies.â Two false impressions that this term creates were identified: The incorrect assumption that both political systems are static when there are in fact âboth converging and diverging trendsâ. Secondly, although there may appear to be âdirect imitationâ, it may in fact be âadaptation into an existing set of practicesâ. In fact the authors noted that during both recent campaigns, experts from the British Labour party and the Clinton team observed each other in action and shared their tactical expertise with each other.
Mancini and Swanson articulate a view that is shared by many academics, offering âAmericanisation not as a conclusion, but as a reference point and a working hypothesis with which to begin the analysis.â
After explaining the higher relative propensity of negative attacks in Australian political advertising, Young writes that âit now seems quite fanciful to blame âAmericanizationâ for the high use of negative political ads, as this has always been a feature of Australian political advertising and Australiaâs use of this style of advertising has been higher than most other western democracies, including the US, for some years.â She suggests that the increase in negative ads has as much to do with the mediums being used and their focus on party leaders as any conscious strategy.
The reality of the lack of Americanisation of Australian politics can be found from exceptions to the commonly held view. In researching this thesis, one would assume that a book titled Developments in Australian politics would contain a string of various examples of how American influences are being adopted and adapted to the Australian political landscape. In fact there are none. This is not a criticism of the book or its many authors; the book simply displays a mature and detailed analysis that does not require comparison to foreign cultural, political and media influences.
A similarly titled book that was published three years later, New developments in Australian politics, does include some American comparisons, such as in a chapter titled The Core Executive by Glyn Davis, in which he explains how, unlike their American counterparts, Australian leaders remain hostage to their party and to the parliament.â
Bob Hogg wisely wrote âcampaigning has to continually adapt to the changes in the habits and social activities of the voters and meet the Australian condition, not Americaâs. If it doesnât, then the campaign will fail.â
Elaine Thompson, who derides many of the marketing and campaigning influences from American politics (including an obsession with image with resulted in Gough Whitlamâs hairstyle being âtransformedâ and âEven John Howard had his glasses changed and his eyebrows tamed for televisionâ!) states that âit would be inappropriate to call Australian politics âAmericanisedâ. Rather American ideas are Australianised by imprinting onto them the Australian way of doing politics and Australian content. Despite all the American-born influences, Australian politics and its political system remain distinctively and uniquely Australian.â
Conclusion
This literature review outlines the vast amount of American and British material on this subject as well as the growing volume of Australian analysis.
The search for âAmerican political campaign techniquesâ has shown nearly all are not exclusive to American politics. In many cases these techniques (with localised variations) are universal but are labeled as âAmericanâ because the texts and examples used as references are American, but this is to be expected when political campaign instruction, research and analysis is documented better in the US than in any other nation and there are more campaign professionals and organisations in the US due to the larger mass of the political consultancy industry, media, academia and related professions. The larger publishing market available to political commentators in the US ensures that the most popular political studies and books are researched, printed and distributed there.
As stated earlier, the lack of similar material in Australia means that Australian campaigners searching for good campaign manuals will inevitably turn to the US.
Although this literature review has identified some techniques that focus on practices that do not seem relevant to Australian politics (such as âget out the vote techniquesâ and foreign finance regulations) this research has begun to demonstrate how all techniques must be localised to some extent and even the most basic tasks such as âdoorknockingâ or âdirect mailâ must be carefully adapted to local conditions and culture or risk alienating local voters.
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The Literature Review Part 5 – The ‘Ground War’: nuts and bolts campaigning techniques
The ‘Ground War’: nuts and bolts campaigning techniques
As mentioned previously, there are several excellent recent US âcampaigning manualsâ such as Campaign Craft by Shea and Burton, Winning elections by R.A. Faucheaux, and
No place for amateurs by Dennis Johnson. A recent UK addition to this stable is The political campaigning book: real lessons from the front line by Lionel Zetter. These manuals explain important foundations such as campaign strategy, research and targeting as well as ‘nuts and bolts campaigning like use of databases, direct mail, doorknocking, phoning, candidate and team training, volunteers, community issue campaigns, use of local media and the like. Errington and van Onselen cite Shea and Burton in the paper Electoral databases: big brother or democracy unbound? They explain how the professionalisation of American campaigns includes the hiring of consultants for database management. Similar (though decentralised) databases now feature prominently in Australian political campaigns as well as MPâs offices. The authors note that âover a decade after their introductionâ the major parties are still unwilling to discuss the details of their electoral databases, although they do obtain training and operation manuals of the Feedback database system from Liberal Party sources.
It is explained that âthe development of the Liberal Partyâs Feedback database was part of a national review of the Coalitionâs 1990 election campaignâ in which it âwas generally recognised that the ALP had out-campaigned the Coalition in key marginal seatsâ. Lessons were learned from the US Republicans about the superior âdevelopment of targeted campaigningâ and although the relevant software was not imported, due to âtechnical difficulties, and differences between the two political systemsâ, a similar system was developed locally.
The party-control of the Feedback and Electrac systems in Australia contrasts with larger political market in the US, âwhere the decentralised major political parties, as well as private campaigns for ballot initiatives, have ensured the development of a lively political database industry.â
Voter contact is an essential element of any political campaign, especially for challengers facing greater resources from incumbents. A great selection of examples of different voter contact techniques can be found in Margaret Savilleâs book The Battle For Bennelong : The Adventures of Maxine McKew, Aged 50 Something where she recounts tales of doorknocking, community meetings, phone canvassing, shopping centre visits, school fetes and more.
Playford to Dunstan provides some great examples of doorknocking prowess in 1960s Australia. It states that âthe major parties geared their campaigns to the obviously marginal seatsâ and âlocal strategy in the marginals emphasised personal canvassingâ and âtroops are out in the biggest sustained doorknocking exercise the State has knownâ. One candidate claimed to have âdoorknocked 90 per cent of the homes in the districtâ and his opponent âin the two years since his endorsement he had managed to visit every home in the constituency twice.â Another candidate complimented his âseven months of doorknocking prior to polling dayâ with âover a dozenâ public meetings with âan average attendance of 150â.
Much of the literature in the US about nuts and bolts campaigning techniques speaks about âvoter turnoutâ or âGOTVâ (get out the vote) and there is a false assumption amongst many campaigners in Australia that our persuasion-focused strategies mean that these techniques are not relevant. Although it can be argued that voter turnout strategies and techniques are not directly applicable in the Australian context, anyone who has been doorknocking in both the US and Australia (as well as in the UK and NZ) will concede that good personal contact techniques are largely universal. Even though they may not be directly applicable, they are certainly (like any good campaign technique from any source) adaptable to an Australian political environment. For example, the technology and investment in a microtargeting survey combined with a doorknocking campaign can be used to maximise voter turnout of partisan voters as well as swinging voters. The survey questions may need to be refined, as well as the scripts for the volunteers, but the fundamental mechanical process would be very similar, as would the cost (in money and volunteers)
In a 1999 study Does Canvassing Increase Voter Turnout? A Field Experiment based on a randomised field experiment involving 30,000 registered voters, Gerber and Green concluded that voter turnout was âincreased substantially by personal canvassing, slightly by direct mail, and not at all by telephone calls (from a phone bank).â The research found âpersonal canvassing has a far greater influence on voter participation than three pieces of professionally crafted mail delivered within two weeks of Election Dayâ. A very interesting aspect of this paper is the hypothesis that âthe decline of personal mobilization has arguably contributed to the erosion of voter turnout in the United States since the 1960s.â
This correlates to the arguments made by others in Australia such as Sally Young and Andrew Leigh that an overemphasis on new campaign techniques such as mass marketing through television has discouraged voter interest in political discourse as they become more personally detached from it and often only see negative aspects via the mainstream media. This also meets with the professional campaigners viewpoint in that although people traditionally complain about disruptive election campaigns and no-one likes to have their busy home-lives interrupted by political canvassers, there is an expectation that all MPs and candidates will spend a significant amount of their time and resources keeping in touch with their constituency, listening to their voters and personally finding out what is happening to people throughout their electorates. Candidates who display these desirable traits should, all else being equal, be more attractive to voters.
Earlier American research, such as Blydenburghâs 1971 paper A Controlled Experiment to Measure the Effects of Personal Contact Campaigning recorded how several candidates performed in a campaign for local office. The experiment was designed to measure the impact of door-to-door canvassing and telephone solicitation. He cites similar studies in the US dating back to elections in the 1920s and although concedes that variables between candidates and different election types cloud his results, comes to the reasonable conclusion that local campaigning will have a greater effect in contest where the message is not influenced by mass media, such as in local government elections.
Conversely, in Constituency Campaigning In Parliamentary Systems With Preferential Voting: Is there a Paradox? Bowler, Farrell and McAllister argue that âlocal campaigning has a very limited impact on the voteâ and âconcludes with an explanation for the apparent paradox of why candidates bother campaigning when it does not make a difference to their voteâ by hypothesising that the activity is designed to impress their colleagues and the party as much as it is design to gain an electoral advantage. The paper focuses on data from the 1993 AES. The first possible problem with this analysis is that 1993 was a very unusual election in that it revolved around a very public (i.e. undertaken via the mass media) discussion about the new Goods and Services Tax which the Hewson Liberals were proposing. Secondly, the study categorises âconstituency workâ as âlocal campaigningâ and even though it includes the disclaimer âthe actual degree to which local constituency work attracts votes is still a matter of debateâ it does not differentiate between âconstituency workâ and âlocal campaigningâ in any marketing or voter canvassing context.
An alternate view can be found in the UK, which correlates more closely with the American research. Whiteley and Seyd show in Local Party Campaigning and Electoral Mobilization in Britain that âlocal campaigning by Labour party members had a significant influence on the Labour vote share in the 1987 election, but not on turnout.â
In another UK article Hanging on the telephone? Doorstep and Telephone Canvassing at the British General Election of 1997. Pattie and Johnston reiterate the findings of Gerber and Green and warn âit would be premature and counterproductive for parties to write off their electoral activistsâ as âface-to-face canvassing paid electoral dividends.â 146 p 322
Denver and Hands et al in Constituency Campaigning in Britain 1992-2001: Centralization and Modernizationâ. Write that constituency (local) campaigning in British general elections has been transformed over the past ten years or so. Firstly, national party headquarters have taken an increasingly large role in planning and managing constituency campaigns. Although the pace of change has varied across the major parties, all are heading down the same road. Secondly, campaigning on the ground has also changed. Technological and other changes have led to a decline in the use of traditional campaign techniques and increased use of new methods, especially in `key’ seats.
In her 2005 research paper for the Australian Parliamentary Library Sarah Miskin stated that in the 2004 federal election, âDirect mail continued to be an important campaign tool, especially in the marginal electorates. The media estimated that the two major parties spent $5 million each on this method of wooing voters. A 2001 study found that such spending was justified because direct-mail and letterbox-drop literature was the primary source of policy information for 41 per cent of those canvassed.â
Miskin also cites Errington and van Onselen as having âdiscussed the sophisticated national databases that the major parties now maintain in order to build profiles of voter interests and target party messages accordinglyâ.
Erringtonâs and van Onselenâs paper âElectoral Databases: Big Brother or Democracy Unbound?â is very detailed in itâs explanations of political databases like the Liberal Ppartyâs Feedback program.
Miskin also quotes their article in the Sydney Morning Herald âX files are keeping odds stacked in favour of MPsâ where they state
Databases are all about helping political parties ensure that their messages are relevant to the recipients. The big parties are already spending less money on broadcast advertising and diverting their resources towards more targeted campaigns.â
Miskin notes the criticisms from some political commentators âthat sitting MPs were able to use taxpayer âbucksââin the form of parliamentary printing and mail allowancesâto pay for their direct mail.
In an interview with Age reporter Michelle Grattan, Former Victorian Liberal Party president Michael Kroger was quoted as saying that the benefits of incumbency (including staff, office and phone as well as printing and mail allowances) were worth $1.5 million to an MP over three years.
Mills describes in detail how âthe advent of direct mail to Australian politics highlights the American derivation of many of our new political technologies.â Richard Viguerie âis the acknowledged high priest of direct mailâ and he âencouraged the Liberals to become the first Australian party to use direct mail.â Using Viguerieâs advice, the Liberals became successful fundraisers in the early 1980s, âutilising the American techniques in copyrighting and list management.â Because of the size of the American market, their commercial techniques are naturally more thoroughly tested and proven. In 1984 The NSW Liberalâs Key Electorates Appeal direct mail fundraising campaign won a gold medal from the Australian Direct Marketing Association.â
Mills writes that âthe secret of direct mail is emotionalism. Direct mail copywriters have an old formula called AIDA, an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. According to one direct mail specialist, the message has to be extremeâŠâ But this extremism in language can backfire in an Australian context. Mills writes that âthe moderate success of the (Liberal fundraising) election mailing was marred by the resentment caused amongst some swinging voters by the forceful language used in the letters.â This is particularly concerning given the compulsory voting laws in Australia and highlights a weakness in adopting American campaign techniques without some consideration of the need to adapt or modify them for the Australian political landscape.
New technologies are anticipated. Recent use of sms as a local organising tool, for internal communications such as to alert candidates and volunteers to campaign messages and activities are becoming more widespread. Although there have been examples of sms use in public campaigning, it is still in its infancy, mostly likely restricted by the ability to send out a thoughtful and intelligent message in 160 characters or less! Sally Young writes about a recent example in a Gold Coast by-election in which nightclub owners supported an independent campaign against the incumbent Mayor, who was proposing to restrict club opening hours. The nightclub owners collected mobile numbers during a promotion with their clients and used those numbers to send several messages to their clients including âGary Baildon thinks your vote wonât count because youâre young and go to nightclubs. He wants you in bed by 3am. Donât let him tell you what to do! Vote him out!â
Plasser notes that the new campaign techniques, as modelled on lessons and observations from the US, have not replaced traditional Australian campaign techniques but have, as Warhurst describes, âbeen superimposed on the latter and has displaced it from the focus of attention.â He writes that âalthough there seems to be plenty of evidence that Australian campaign styles have moved closer toward the US modelâ there is also âconvincing evidence for the viability of prevailing country- and culture-specific Australian campaign styles, determined by regulatory frameworks, the alternative preference vote, compulsory voting, public finance of elections, and the party-driven dynamics of political competition.â
Not all that is written about local campaign techniques by political parties in Australia is accurate because the parties have until recently gone to great lengths to maintain competitive advantages over their rivals by keeping details about various techniques confidential. In his book on the 1987 campaign Warhurst writes (based on a couple of different newspaper reports) that the ALP used âa telephone survey called Polfileâ and in one electorate alone âsixty-five separate personalised letters were sent to electors selected through telephone surveyingâ. Most likely this second-hand account describes the use of a direct mail and database program called Polfile (the clunkier predecessor to the ALPâs Electrac, which Errington and van Onselen have written about extensively). Polfile is not a telephone survey, although it can feasibly be used to generate the contact or calling lists for such a survey, as can any list based on the electoral roll and white pages, both publicly available through commercial sources such as those described earlier.
Previous notes about the 2005-2007 ACTU YRAW campaign have referred to its importance in framing debate during federal election and the online component, but it is important to remember that its success was largely based on its mobilisation effort.
Under the sub-heading âUNION MOBILISATIONâSOME IMPLICATIONSâ in the article Election 2007: Did the union campaign succeed? Spies-Butcher and Wilson explain that âIn America, politics in recent years have been shaped by greater mobilisation of the union vote for the Democrats under a reformist AFL-CIO leadership that won office in 1996 (and their new rivals in the âChange to Winâ coalition). Union mobilisation of the vote is an offshoot of political unionism that (recognises)⊠the union movement depends not only on a strong shopfloor presence but on a favourable legal and political environment as well.â The lessons of union mobilisation in the US were applied successfully by the ACTU and its affiliates in Australia in 2007. âLike the American labour movement, the ACTU has offset its declining natural constituency by more strongly mobilising its remaining membership, renewing it in the process. And so the tactics the ACTU employed during the 2007 election were much closer to those of a grass roots mobilisation than to the simple increase in resources, or targeted promises, that accompany other marginal seat campaigns. This is important both in highlighting the continuing power and importance of the union movement in Australia, and in opening up the possibility of the broader significance of electoral mobilisation by social movements. Perhaps the era of activist electoral politics is not yet dead, but waiting to be remobilised.â
Andrew Leighâs home-grown studies (with some theoretical underpinning from US and UK research) demonstrate very elaborate investigation into demographics and electoral behaviour. Using âa large repeated cross-sectional dataset from 1966 to 2001â Leigh undertakes innovative research which shows partisan tendencies based on various demographic characteristics such as wealth, neighbourhood, age, gender and immigration.
The Literature Review Part 4 – the ‘Air War’: advertising, earned media, TV, the Internet and new technologies
Comparing the ‘Air War’: advertising, earned media, TV, the Internet and new technologies
Competitive Australian political practitioners have always been keen to learn from the most professional democracy industry and innovators in the world. Young describes Laborâs experimentation with TV in the 1960s âPart of their inspiration and source of some of their ideas came from observing US elections and imitating American campaign techniques.â
Using documents from the National Library, Young writes that âIn 1964, Cyril S Wyndham, the general Secretary of the Labor Party, had argued in an internal memo that âUltimately, the Party will have to face up to the need for an effective television schemeâ (Sourced from NLA manuscripts, MS4985, Box 141, folder 178, 1964. âImprovement in public relations – Memo from General Secretary to the national organising Committee.â)â
Bob Hogg describes how the 1966 federal election campaign led by Arthur Calwell âwas at the exact moment (in Australian politics) when the hall meeting was overtaken by television.â Hoggâs explanation though is that this TV revolution did not occur for any reason of American influence or presidentialisation of the campaign. He explains that the campaign simply continued earlier practices of focussing on the leader âjust as it did in Curtin and Chifleyâs daysâ and the âcapacity of the leader to handle new forms of communication had always been critical to a successful campaignâ. He goes on to explain that the leaderâs campaign effort was but one piece in a complicated jigsaw and successful Australian political campaigns require a similar effort (to that of the leader) from the whole front bench as well as local members.
Young states that the ârevolutionaryâ nature of the âItâs timeâ TV ads was the way it transformed the techniques used and replaced the âdull talking heads of a speaker talking to the cameraâ with a market-tested slogan. Young also points to influences from a famous American book âThe Selling Of the Presidentâ by Joe McGinnis, which gave an inside account of the lead up to the 1968 US presidential election. Nixonâs staffers were told to âgive him words to say that will show his emotional involvement in the issues. He is inclined to be too objective, too much the lawyer building a case, too cold and logical.â Two years later, the market research prepared by âSpectrum Internationalâ for the ALP advised the lawyer Whitlam to âstate his policies in emotional rather than factual termsâ.
In 1984 a book was written by Ed Diamond, which followed a study of political TV ads and concluded that all followed âan unwritten style book of conventionsâ. The book The Spot outlines four phases of a typical advertising campaign: Introduction, Argument, Attack and Vision.
Mills identifies several shortcomings in the Diamond theory, namely that there is no allowance for targeting, there is the assumption that the audience for all the ads is similar and the uniqueness of the Australian context, where a two-type typology is more logical: negative and positive. Yet Mills gives a detailed account of one example of a US TV attack/negative ad (the 1956 Democrat ad against Eisenhower) in which a âHowâs that again?â is used to highlight and question a statement by the opposition candidate and undermine their credibility. Mills explains that both Labor and Liberal parties used a similar ad in 1975.
Since 1984, every Australian federal election campaign except 1987 has featured a televised leaderâs debate. McAllister notes in The Personalization of Politics (2005) that âthe popular focus on leaders is now commonplace across almost all the major parliamentary systems, where parties once occupied centre stage.â McAllister identifies the common explanation of âthe growth of electronic mediaâ but also states that âno single explanation accounts for the increasing personalisation of politics in democratic societies and that what has been occurring is complex and multi-causal.â
Plasser writes that now âcampaigns are fought and won on televisionâ and ânumerous studies have dealt with the impact of television on prevailing campaign practices from a comparative perspective, reaching more or less identical conclusions: television has changed campaign practices in an unprecedented way.â
Mills describes the âmanifestation of what American researchers have labelled the metacampaign â competition for favourable judgements from the political elite (pollsters, senior journalists, donors, etc.) about their âelectabilityâ.â Mills explain how âeach of which has a multiplier effect amongst the general voting population.â
Reporting designed primarily for political junkies such as Sky News would further exacerbate Millsâ âmultiplier effectâ. Sky News captures only 0.5 per cent of the Australian TV audience but is compulsory viewing for campaign and political professionals and those who write about them. Modern online communities described as ânetrootsâ and âblogocracyâ also sometimes persuade stories and opinions in the mainstream media. The metacampaign and its multiplier effect are further complicated by the filtering of political message which the mainstream media conducts as a matter of course. Sally Young found âthat the average election-news story is only two minutes long â and during this story, the reporter and host speak for more than half the time while politicians speak only in 7 second soundbitesâ. Worse still were examples from âtown halls-styleâ speeches such as the Liberal Party campaign launch where âJohn Howard delivered a speech for 42 minutes but that night on the evening news, voters heard only 10.4 seconds of it. We know from American research that the soundbite has shrunk over time, keeps on shrinking and that they have less soundbites on their news compared to ours. So, if we follow American trends in news production – and we often seem to – this will happen here as well.â
Philip Senior wrote in 2007 that âAlthough the influence of political leaders in determining electoral outcomes has been the subject of research in the United States and Canada for a number of decades (see Stokes, Campbell and Miller 1958; Miller and Levitin 1976), it is only since the 1980s that it has received scholarly attention in Australia. Over the past two decades a significant volume of research has emerged examining the existence of leadership effects in Australian elections, and the fact that the popularity of party leaders exerts an influence on vote choice is now well established Leadership effects are significant and visible features of national elections, and have regularly accounted for 1â2% of the national vote, and as much as 4% or more on some occasionsâ. However, Seniorâs analysis reveals that the evidence does not support the conclusion that voters have become more sensitive to evaluations of major party leaders over the period examined (six federal elections from 1990â2004).
In a 2002 study “Television Effects and Voter Decision Making in Australia: A Re-examination of the Converse Model” Denemark used Australian data âto re-examine Converse’s thesis that the mass media’s electoral effects are felt most strongly amongst voters with the lowest levels of political interest and awareness.â His results show that voters with the lowest levels of prior political awareness are the most responsive to effects of overall television news exposure, and they employ those media cues in their vote decisions late in the campaign.
âEarned mediaâ can be used to repeat and promote advertisements which would otherwise go unnoticed by the general public. The key is to get the interest of the professional media in reporting aspects of the political strategy, message or plan.
Greg Daniel was Managing Director of the NSW Liberal Partyâs advertising firm The Campaign Palace in 1987 and also discusses the Liberal TV ads which appeared during their âdress rehearsalâ prior to the 1988 election: âWe needed the dress rehearsal particularly to convince the media that we were a professional unit. Until that time theyâd regarded us â with some degree of correctness â as a bit of a joke in terms of our ability to organise and run a campaign. So we had to change that perception and one of the simplest ways to impress journalists seems to be with television commercials. So we prepared one that said we were ready when we werenât. The commercial was made with the hope that it would galvanise the party into believing it was ready and members would start acting out the role the commercial portrayed, with Greiner as Premier already. This is a lesson we learnt from Brian Daleâs book (Ascent to Power, Wran and the Media, Allen and Unwin, 1985) about Wranâs win in â75/â76. Labor created the feeling of the inevitability of government.
Andrew Hughes defined negative advertising as advertising that targets the attacked candidateâs weakness in issues or image and that highlights the sponsoring candidateâs strengths in these areas by sending a negatively framed message.
Sally Young describes how there is a large body of US research which has found that the use of negative political advertising grew dramatically in the US during the 1980s and 1990s. In Australia however there has been only âinformal speculationâ that variously describes the increasing negativity of TV advertising as the âAmericanisationâ of Australian political advertising or âAmerican-style TV attack adsâ.
Sally Young also refers to writing by Ward & Cook (1992) which expresses fear that there are considerable dangers to democracy in Australia âwhilst the parties continue to imitate American campaign methods.â
In a 2004 parliamentary library research note Political Advertising In Australia Sarah Miskin and Richard Grant explore some important aspects of Australian political advertising, including the current legislation, the debates over ‘truth’ in content and the claims that Australia’s political parties are opting for ‘Americanised’ election advertisements âprimarily based on negative or âattackâ advertisingâ. An accusation by former Labor leader Mark Latham that a Liberal Party advertisement targeting his alleged failings as a mayor was âdishonestâ and âpersonalâ and reflected âAmerican-style negative advertisingâ contradicts findings from political scientists like Sally Young who show that, ârather than reflecting a shift to Americanised techniques, negativity in campaigning was already a quite distinctly Australian featureâ, although she âacknowledges that a more recent move towards personalised, rather than general, negative advertising in Australia can be seen to reflect American campaign-advertising styles.â
Sally Youngâs research shows that âcomparing the results with overseas studies which have used the same methodology suggests that negative political advertising is higher in Australia than in most comparable Western democraciesâincluding the US. However, there are still some important differences in emphasis. Negative ads in the U.S. focus more on the personal characteristics of opponents than in Australiaâwhere negative ads still generally focus on policy and performance issues.â Young also writes that her research suggests that ânegative advertising in Australia is not an entirely new trend, nor a result of âAmericanisationââ but has in fact âa long history in Australiaâ due to a fiercely partisan two-party adversarial systemâ.
In an article of the 1998 Australian federal election in the journal Electoral Studies, David Butler writes âBoth sides spent heavily on extensive and overwhelmingly negative television advertising. Voters in marginal seats received a lot of direct mail.â
Sally Young compared the ads in the 2000 US presidential election, where â71% of American ads contained a personal attack, compared to only 6% of ads used in the nearest Australian election in 2001.â But in 1993 âa massive 75% of federal election ads in Australia were negative compared to 37% of American political ads in 1992.â
One would expect this negativity in Australian ads, whilst already much higher than American comparisons, will actually increase over coming years since regulations were dramatically liberalised in the 2004 federal election when âthe Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations (FACTS) ceased its self-appointed role of scrutinizing the content of political ads for veracity after discovering that the requirements of the Trade Practices Act of 1974 did not apply to political advertising.â
Young also quotes an observation by Stephen Mills and H OâNeil (of which I have been unable to find an original copy) that âAustralian ads deal⊠more with arguing and attacking than American adsâ.
No historical overview of negative political advertising in Australia would be complete without discussion of âJohn Henry Australâ, a character in a radio drama created by Sim Rubensohn, Liberal advertising agent in 1948. Mills describes Menzies re-election in 1949 as âthe first use in Australian politics of recognisable âmodernâ advertising techniques.â
Don Whitington, in his book, The Rulers, describes Menzies as the first Australian politician to seriously exploit the electronic media and to cultivate a public image through extensive PR work.
Bridget Griffen-Foley describes how the Liberals Federal President Richard Casey wrote to Menzies âabout a discovery he made as ambassador in Washington. Casey learned from American friends about a new profession called âPublic Relationsâ that had developed in the 1930s. After consulting a leading practitioner in New York, Casey became convinced of the need to create a favourable atmosphere to advance oneâs cause.â
Casey hired Rubensohn in 1947 after learning he had split from his former federal Labor employers over the Chifley Governmentâs plans to nationalise banks. In a letter to Menzies in 1949 (cited by Sally Young from the National library) , Rubensohn describes his preference for negative advertising:
âMy experience is that vigorous attack directed against chinks in the other manâs political armour is of vital importance in assuring the effectiveness of election advertising. I feel very strongly on this point. I am convinced that non-militant advertising no matter how âpositiveâ its underlying message may be, is ineffectual, lacks attention value, is unconvincing and a waste of money.â
Rubensohn utilised the popular radio drama format of the 30s and 40s to deliver Menziesâ political message into the lounge rooms of Australian voters. He created a character âJohn Henry Australâ who, according to Mills âfor more than 18 months presented dramatised accusations to the nation about the Chifley Governmentâs socialist sins.â
Mills delves deeply into the John Henry Austral story and bases much of his analysis on the archived letters between Menzies and Rubensohn held in the national Library, as well as thesis by Sim Rubensohnâs daughter Victoria Braund titled Themes in political advertising, Australian Federal Election campaigns 1949-1972. There is also an online article by Robert Crawford Modernising Menzies, Whitlam, and Australian Elections which cites Mills and Braund and links the two campaigns and âtheir innovative use of electronic mediaâ as the prime examples âwhich helped usher Australian politics into the modern eraâ.
Itâs clear from the descriptions that Australâs commentaries were a clever combination of anti-communist fear-mongering and nationalist concerns. Mills explains that âAustralâs preference for the Liberal Party as the panacea to the nationâs problems was never too deeply hiddenâ but that Austral âpresented himself as an independent commentator whose Liberal sympathies sprang less from partisanship than from nationalism and common-sense rejection of the amorphous and emotional horrors that Labor was inflicting.â The Liberals spent a relative fortune on this radio campaign and used it as a complement to another advertising idea borrowed from America âCountry Quizâ which the Liberal party sponsored. Mills states it was estimated that the Liberals spent a million pounds winning the 1949 federal election. The important lessons of the campaign (such as the use of electronic media to broadcast aggressive and emotional advertising as well as the centralisation of the campaign in the federal party organisation) âwere not repeated for the 23 years of Liberal rule. Even after Rubensohn came back to the Labor side, such a campaign was financially impossible and probably politically impossible too.â
Victoria Rubensohn writes that during the 23 years of Liberal rule following the 1949 election, âAustralian elections tended to be fought with pre-war, pre-mass-media techniquesâ with text heavy print advertisements of policy promises and dogma.
It was not until the 1972 âItâs Timeâ campaign that electronic advertising seemed to again play such a dramatic role in an Australian election. Again, Rubensohn was part of the team, his agency having previously merged with the American advertising giant McCann Erikson. Mills writes that the âItâs Timeâ campaign âbears most of the Austral insurgency hallmarks of long-term advertising and disciplined centralisation.â
Wherever there is negative advertising there is also a need to counter it. Sally Young writes in 2005 that âAside from âItâs the economy stupidâ, itâs less well known that Bill Clintonâs campaign team had another unofficial slogan in 1992: âSpeed Killsâ,â referring to the need to speed and flexibility to make response ads and get them on air quickly.
We saw a great example of this in 2007 during the federal election when Labor used a video image of Kevin Rudd turning off a TV attack ad which had been aired by the Liberals (the day before) with a remote control and then addressing the camera to deal with the allegations. The Liberals responded with a spoof of the Labor ad, showing Howard turn off the original Labor response ad. Comedians on the TV program âThe Chaserâ then stretched the concept to the limit, showing a continuous loop of people turning off each otherâs TV ads with remotes.
Mills details one of the earliest instances of successful negative TV advertising during the 1980 federal election when âThe Liberals broadcast one of the most negative television commercials of Australiaâs political history, the famous âwealth taxâ advertisement which haunted middle Australia with the threat of new Labor taxes on home owning.â Despite âBill Haydenâs Laborâs Opposition putting together the most disciplined research and communications campaign it had ever managed, one that was clearly better than the Governmentâsâ and Hayden âregularly polling better than Malcolm Fraserâ, Fraser was returned to office.
Lynton Crosby, in his post-1998-election analysis, explained that negative advertising is not meant to be liked or enjoyed âPolitical advertising is unique, a fact that the dozens of marketing and advertising experts who seem to be wheeled out to make commentary during and after a campaign do not seem to understand. Election advertising is not designed to be liked but rather to have an effect on peopleâs voting behaviourâ
During the recent 2007 federal election, the Howard Government attacked Laborâs new leader Kevin Rudd repeatedly and also attacked the Labor brand using scare campaigns about âwall-to-wall Laborâ, âUnion bulliesâ and Peter Garrettâs environmental policies, all to little effect. In her essay Exit Right. The unravelling of John Howard Judith Brett describes how Howardâs attacks on Rudd surprised even the visiting American pollster Frank Luntz, who described them as âthe most blunt terminology I have ever seen a leader useâ. Luntz joked that for every question journalists asked Howard, he found a way to criticise Rudd with the answer. âIf someone asks him: Whereâs the toilet? He answers: Exactly where Australia will be if Kevin Rudd becomes the Prime Ministerâ
Commentating on the recent CLP comeback in the Northern territory in August 2007, Senator Mark Arbib wrote âWhile some people think that wedge politics originated in the USA with the Republicans, it was the CLP who specialised in it much earlier: using law and order to drive a wedge between the local indigenous and white community. It’s a tactic that has helped them win many elections and almost got them home last Saturday.â
It is important to remember that the systemic differences between US and Australian elections result in different strategies being pursued by seemingly similar campaign techniques. Many US studies focus measurement of campaign effect by looking at voter turnout, which can be more easily measured than subjective statements about why people vote a certain way based on the effects of persuasive arguments and messages. It is often suggested that one of the electoral strategies in negative campaigning in the US is âvoter suppressionâ or âturnout suppressionâ, where the content and volume of negative messages and materials dampens turnout. Gerber, Green and Green conducted randomised field experiments which âindicate partisan campaign mail does little to stimulate voter turnout and may even dampen it when the mail is negative in toneâ As far as the author could find, no similar randomised studies exist about the effect in Australian elections. 31
During the 2006 US congressional elections the author witnessed first hand the results of a local Republican voter suppression strategy and techniques utilising robocalls targeted at Democrat voters in Philadelphia. One voter called to complain to the Democrat campaign after receiving three messages in four hours. Each pro-Republican call misleadingly began, “Hello, I’m calling with information about Lois Murphy⊔ and many were received late at night and early in the morning, designed to inconvenience and upset Democrat supporters who would hang up on the calls before hearing the Republican tag at the end. Many called the campaign office, mistakenly believing the calls were made by the Murphy campaign and disgusted that the Democrat campaign would harass voters in such a way.
There have been many reports about the long-term ill-effects of negative advertising on democracy and voter turnout, as well as explanations of why negative advertising is used. In Does negative advertising work? Harris and Kolovos list numerous marketing-based principals (such as differentiating candidates, memorable messaging, newsworthiness) as well as electoral effects (motivating your base and suppressing your opposition turnout). 114
Mills is adamant in his 1986 book that âlargely American-derived marketing techniquesâ have changed Australian politics âbeyond recognitionâ â but have they? Recent innovations since the 1970s have certainly made politics more professional and expensive but the fundamentals of political success remain the same, if not the technology that is used to help deliver a political message. One of his assertions seems premature (with the benefit of hindsight): âThe old ways â stump speeches, town hall meetings, closely typed handbills (ok, heâs right on the money with that one) â have given way to computers and TV and public opinion polls and group discussions and phone polls and direct mail.â
Former ALP National Secretary Bob Hogg is critical of âsentimental argumentsâ decrying the end of town hall meetings, as well as suggestions that modern campaigns being âtoo presidentialâ. In his chapter Hawke the campaigner, from The Hawke government: a critical retrospective Hogg writes that âWe have moved from hall and street meetings simply because people now rarely turn up. Decades ago such meetings in much smaller communities were a part of the mass communication of the times. They no longer are. Television and radio are the most effective ways to reach a mass audience.â
But have much of âthe old waysâ that Mills and Hogg refer to been replaced? Or has the form of mass communication changed to suit various candidates and campaign managers? The lead up to the 2004 federal election saw a revival of the âcampaign busâ concept, itself borrowed from the campaign trains and buses of US political history. Although the final result of the Latham campaign bus was immersed in a wider political tragedy, the localised results were impressive, with 600-800 people cramming school halls and bowling clubs for a turn at the microphone and the Leaderâs ear. The nightly news predictably focused on the one or two hecklers at each event, rather than the vast majority of participants who were enthusiastic participants in an âold styleâ unscripted town hall meeting.
2004 also saw the direct import of some email and sms spamming techniques from the US into Australia via Prime Minister John Howardâs son, who had spent some time working closely with US republicans in George Bushâs office. Julianne Stewart described how âSeveral Liberal MPs used Howardâs sonâs Internet company to send email spam to their electoratesâ and were able to do so because âpolitical and religious organisations are exempt from recent anti-spamming legislation in Australia.â
In the 2006 Queensland election both parties produced websites that, although far from cutting edge, indicated that the internet had become a permanent feature of Australian campaigns. Stephen Dann disparaged the Coalition website from a political marketing perspective explaining âVisually, technically and politically, this is a campaign website that needs five fab web designers and a makeover. The unspoken message from the site is a political campaign nightmare – the design is old, the reference to the PM makes it seem like qldcoalition.com isn’t really a state website, and placement of the policy link as the last on the page says volumes about the party’s priorities. None of this is probably intentional, but it’s all harmful to the political message. This site looks marginally better than you’d expect at Yahoo!Geocities but is definitely is getting beaten at any point in the web design spectrum by the TeamBeattie site.â Describing both sites âThere are no revolutionary new media techniques, no adoption of the cutting edge, and that’s probably for the best. Political campaigning as we currently recognise it is incompatible with the open platform “spaces people use” approach of Web 2.0, and far more at home in the Web 1.0 “place you go” style. If you were looking for a revolution in Internet politics at the state level, you’ll have to wait for the next election.â
A few months later in early 2007, the NSW state election brought one new aspect to internet political campaigning â the humorous âjib-jabâ style of cartoon singing parody. A Labor YouTube video cartoon and jingle âIn the Liberalsâ made fun of Liberal Leader Peter Debnam, a former naval officer, to the tune of the famous Village People song In the navy. The videoâs appearance on mainstream TV helped publicise the anti-Liberal YouTube website http://www.youtube.com/user/debnamrecord.
The humour of YouTube cannot work in isolation. The animation described above summarised the widely held opinion in the mass media that the opposition leader was not a serious contender. The image of him in his speedos came to define that assessment.
One of the unexpected effects of YouTube has been to revive interest and appreciation in some aspects of old-style campaigning, namely good speeches and quick-witted responses during debates and interviews. Within hours of an impressive candidate speech by presidential hopeful Barack Obama or a mistake by President George Bush, it appears on the web for all who care to see and make their own judgement.
In September 2007 the E-Voter institute in the US published an extensive report about the latest developments in Internet campaigning. It is important to look at because it identified several weaknesses in the trend to more online campaigning: voters prefer TV ads as a medium for information from candidates; internet tools are seen as effective for reaching liberal activists (but not conservatives); and online social networking sites a good for âcreating a buzzâ and âspreading a messageâ but not necessarily effective stimulants for traditional political activism.
It will be interesting to see if the research following this yearâs presidential election bucks these trends, particularly as there have been many recent report that some traditional campaign activities (such as fundraising) are now done just as efficiently online as using traditional techniques (phone and mail).
The 2007 Australian federal election was often referred to as âthe YouTube electionâ (as was the 2006 US mid-term election). Macnamara uses media content analysis to find the term was used no less than 19 times in the mainstream media in the three months prior to the election date. Some of the ânew mediaâ which is identified in E-Electioneering – Use of New Media in the 2007 Australian Federal Election includes: Political and election related Web sites including personal Web sites of political candidates; political party Web sites; and independent Web sites including http://www.federalelection.com.au;Â http://www.google.com.au/election2007; http://www.electiontracker.net; http://www.Youdecide2007.org;Â Senator On-Line (www.senatoronline.org.au); and GetUp (www.getup.org.au); Blogs of political candidates such as The Bartlett Diaries (www.andrewbartlett.com/blog)Â and independent election-related blogs such as Crikey (www.crikey.com.au);Â http://www.newmatilda.com and Possum Pollytics (www.possumcomitatus.wordpress.com); [author â he omits the popular mumble.com.au and Pollbludger.com.au]; Vlogs (video Web logs); MySpace sites (www.myspace.com); Facebook sites (www.facebook.com);Â YouTube (www.youtube.com); Chat rooms and online forums; Wikis; E-newsletters (online or downloadable in PDF format); E-surveys (online surveys); and other online communication such as online petitions. Macnamara concludes that the effect of new media is still patchy as participation rates are still low, particularly compared to the US, with its higher use of broadband. He also concurs with a recent American study that âsome level of digitally-enhanced democracy is occurringâ but that the medium is still dominated by official channels.
McAllister and Gibson use figures from the 2007 Australian Election Study to demonstrate the growing importance of new web 2.0 technologies to the modern Australian campaign. From a professional campaign perspective, a randomised field study would be required to support their conclusions of the âsignificant electoral advantage that accrues to candidates who possess a personal websiteâ however their findings about the turning point that has been reached with these new campaign tools is beyond question. The AES found that âvoters themselves reported considerably more use of the internet to access election news than at any time in the past.â Although âthe Internet is still far behind television as a source of election newsâ, âit is rapidly catching up with newspapers and radio.â McAllister and Gibson write how the Kevin07 website âbecame synonymous with the message of engagement, openness and progressive change that Labor and particularly their leader, sought to embody. Mirroring the efforts of the US presidential candidates, the pages contained numerous calls for voters to donate, volunteer, spread the word online and contribute to Kevinâs blog, as well as links through to his pages on MySpace, Facebook and an official YouTube video channel.
McAllister quotes a Chen and Walsh study which criticised politicianâs websites for âlow functionality, with basic search and feedback facilities existing on less than half of the sites examinedâ. Even though they conclude that the use of web campaigning has become more complex, there is no critique of poor political website or Internet practice in the McAllister and Gibson. Practitioners in 2007 and in previous elections are aware of many poor political websites which could possibly lose as many votes as they earn, so there is certainly more room for some case study analysis, combined with randomised sampling to try and measure the effect of different styles of web campaigning and focus on different functionality (video, policy information, still photos, biography, blogging, interactivity, etc.) affects electoral outcome. Practitioners (mostly MPs and their campaign teams) who donât understand the statistical science behind McAllisterâs study will predictably react with the notion that their conclusions about correlation are beyond dispute but that the causal links between web activity and electoral success are still in doubt due to the numerous local, candidate, national and state factors which may not have been considered in the statistics. The author witnessed such an exchange of ideas between an MP and McAllister and Gibson, during a discussion about their 2006 paper linking electoral success in the 2004 election and online campaigning, and the authors have since written âwhether such conversion power can be attributed to the viewing of a website is clearly debatableâ. With the benefit of hindsight, itâs clear that the disputed premise of their earlier study has in fact proven to be correct from a practitionerâs viewpoint, given the electoral benefits of the Kevin07 online campaign. But it is debatable which elements of the online campaign can be successfully replicated by individual MPs and parties in the future. The practitioners will always be primarily concerned with any electoral competitive advantage that can be gained from such analysis and where they cannot discern it, will revert to methods they believe are more effective.
Supporting views from Miskin, Bruns and Kissane add weight to the argument that one specific aspect of their online campaign, both partyâs YouTube postings, were primarily targeted at journalists in the mainstream media, in a successful strategy to capture airtime on TV and online news sites ârather than âcraft a message to suit the mediumâ.
Australian characters have also featured in American online campaigning discourse. In the lead up to the 2007 federal election, Prime Minister John Howard made a widely reported and unveiled attack on Barack Obama and the US Democrats when he described the US Presidential Primary contest and likely win by Barack Obama: “If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.” Obama, campaigning in Iowa, told reporters he was flattered that one of Bush’s allies “started attacking me the day after I announced (his presidential run) – I take that as a compliment.” The Democratic presidential hopeful said if the Australian Prime Minister was “ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq,” he needs to send another 20,000 Australians to the war, “otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.”
Within hours, US television networks were reporting the exchange and it was only a matter of time before comedians like Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report (which humorously poses as a neo-conservative media show) joined in the fray when he let fly with a stereotype-laden retort that was widely distributed via YouTube:
âBravo Prime Minister, or as they say in Australia, didgeridoo your mateship. (audience laughs) I guess now we know what those kangaroos are hiding in their pouches, (gestures with hands) kookaburra-sized balls (laughter). The conservative Howard knows that in this war you are either with us, or youâre a Democrat (laughter). Which brings me to my next wag of the finger, (pointing sternly at camera) to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, for slamming a citizen of the United States (laughter). Listen you sawed off wallaby, we know âfostersâ is Australian for âbeerâ but whatâs Australian for âshut your damned trapâ? (laughter) Keep your shrimp-stained fingers off Barack Obama. (laughter) Leave the ad hominem attacks on him to Americans. Why donât you go back to worrying about your little cane toad problem and the fact that your whole damned countryâs descended from criminals? (laughter) Oh, and the next time youâre âWaltzing with Matildaâ, you might want to check out her Adamâs apple, âcause sheâs a dude! (Audience in uncontrollable laughter, while Colbert composes himself and shuffles papers together, adjust suit and glasses). That being said, I agree with everything he said.â
In many ways the new technologies have replaced more traditional forms of political entertainment that were once provided by Soap-box debates in forums such as Melbourneâs pubs or Sydneyâs Domain.
Ian Ward wrote that the although both major parties in the 2007 election did develop a Web2.0 Internet campaign, neither major party engaged an online audience in their campaign in the way modern US campaigns do, or even the way the activist site GetUp has demonstrated is possible. The most watched YouTube political videos were not party ads, but satirical clips such as that produced by a Sydney law student depicting Kevin Rudd in the style of Mao Zedong in Chinese propaganda films, and take-offs of 80s music clips with lyrics that ridiculed John Howard.
Ward writes that âLabor’s pitch to the YouTube generation is one key to explaining the sizeable swing the ALP obtained on November 24. The key point to be made is not that Labor made effective use of Web2.0 to engage Generation YouTube, but that it was able to use its Kevin.07 website and Facebook, MySpace and YouTube to brand Rudd as a new generation leader with fresh ideas, and the ALP as the party of innovation. Relatively few Gen Y voters visited its website or downloaded its ads from Labor’s YouTube channel. Nonetheless Labor was able to employ its Internet presence as a marketing tool, to connect with younger voters more broadly, and to reverse the Liberals’ ascendancy amongst voters in the 18 to 34 age range.â
In an article describing the 2007 election debate about Industrial Relations, Diana Kelley wrote âPerhaps the most effective use of new media came through the progressivist and activist sites such as GetUp and, the ACTU directed Your Rights at Work. These offered opportunities not only to express ideas, debate and discuss issues, describe personal experiences, but most notably to be engaged in the election process, rather than as passive recipients of information.â
The most memorable (because they were the most entertaining) episodes of YouTube campaigning on the Internet were provided by highly engaged voters, operating without party instruction or affiliation. The best examples were from a 24 year old Sydney Law Student Hugh Atkin produced the now famous online âChinese Propaganda Videoâ portraying Kevin Rudd as mandarin-speaking clone of Chairman Mao. So popular was this video that it was literally viewed by millions who saw it regularly rebroadcast on TV through shows like âInsidersâ, âSunriseâ and various talk-shows. It was a great demonstration of the viral nature of humorous YouTube videos, especially the dramatic effect they can have if the virus leaps into another broadcast medium.
Another popular video was âJohn Howard 2007 Bennelong Time Since I Rock and Rolledâ which was put together, along with many other anti-Howard online videos by a resident of Howardâs electorate of Bennelong, Stefan Sojka. Stefanâs experience as a creative director in a Sydney-based web design company meant he was armed and ready for the 2007 campaign and made the most of his creative humour and intimate knowledge of Howard and his policies to impress a growing online audience.
Macnamara describes how âmost journalists and commentators reported that the ALPâs use of new media was more effective than the Liberal Partyâs based on online feedback, viewer ratings, volumes of âfriendsâ and public discussion.â
It was frequently reported that the Kevin07 site followed the conventions of new media more closely and that Kevin Rudd was generally more comfortable and familiar with the protocols and etiquette of the Web. One journalist noted: âLaunching his MySpace site in mid-July, [Kevin Rudd] deftly promised â in response to a teenager’s criticism that his website was ugly â that he was âhaving it pimpedââ (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 2007). Another reported that: âJohn Howardâs foray into YouTube was a complete flop, provoking hundreds of âmashupsâ satirical responses attacking the PM and his policies. âIt was like vultures picking at a carcass. Howard failed because he didnât understand the medium and its rules. He just plonked himself in YouTube without even an introduction,â [digital marketing expert Julian] Cole says. Kevin Rudd is choosing to campaign with his Kevin07 website, which links to his pages on Facebook, MySpace and YouTube: innovative media choices that Mr Cole says add weight to the ALP leaderâs âfresh ideasâ philosophyâ (The Age, 25 October 2007). Australiaâs leading media buyer Harold Mitchell observed that John Howard appeared uncomfortable in his use of new media.
Some of the best users of the new ICTs have been third party groups like Unions and GetUp! In an online article on Crikey, Andrew Hughes explains âthe influence of stakeholder groups has long been an issue in Australian politics. Some stakeholder groups have direct influence on the formulation of not just party policy, but party administration, choice of candidates and campaigning. The union movement still exerts a tremendous influence on the Labor Party and there is no doubt that business groups such as the Business Council of Australia have a direct influence on the Liberal Party. Even the so called minor parties are not free from the influence of stakeholder groups â the Greens are influenced by the larger organisations in the conservation movement such as the ACF, the Nationals by the NFF and Family First by the new religious churches such as Hillsong. In its short three years of operation GetUp! has grown more rapidly than any other political organisation in Australian history with its simple product offering people everywhere to have a say on the issue of their choice. They know their power is their massive membership base, particularly in the critical 18-39 age middle class segment. Ask any consumer goods marketer and theyâll tell you that if you can crack this segment then you can nearly control the market. No surprise then that this is now the hottest segment to control in politics. Win this segment and you win elections. GetUp!, with so many of its members falling into this category, has suddenly won a lot of friends and learned how to influence people. If it fails to act impartially then GetUp! will notice that the 18-39 segment is also fickle and will leave it in droves. GetUp! and other stakeholder groups are a fixture of Australian politics whose true influence we are only now beginning to see.
The use of TV commercials which have a strategic role in convincing the media of a theme or message continues and has expanded to include new technologies such as YouTube. In 2007 both sides effectively utilised the news mediaâs interest in the campaign to promote their message.
Commercials that only had a short run on TV, or in some cases, only appeared on the Internet, even though they were referred to misleadingly as âTV advertisementsâ got more âairtimeâ via news reporting of the message rather than the paid advertisements themselves.
In 2007, the media widely reported that the Labor Party was utilising a new campaign technique introduced to Australia by the Liberals in 2004. Automatic phone messages, often referred to in the US as ârobocallsâ were copied directly by the Liberals from the US Republican campaign handbook. It was reported earlier that one of Mr Howardâs sons had worked on the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign in the US. In October 2004, the following phone message was sent by the Liberal party to homes across Australia:
âHello this is John Howard. I’ve taken the unusual step of contacting you with this recorded message to support your local Liberal candidate for Bowman, Andrew Laming. As part of my Federal Liberal team, Andrew Lamming ⊠I know Andrew Lamming and I know he will get things done for Bowman. This is John Howard on behalf of Andrew Lamming. Thank you for your time.â
Unfortunately the 2004 calls seemed to generate a large amount of negative feedback. Robocalls a widely used in the US for a variety of purposes. So widespread is there use (and misuse) that legislation exists in a number of states to limit their use. The legislation is hamstrung by the fractured and inconsistent nature of state-based laws in the US, thus providing as many loopholes as restrictions for candidates and campaign teams in the use of this new weapon. In 2004 in Australia the headlines reporting this new campaign method included âLiberal telephone calls anger votersâ and âLiberal phone spam doesn’t ring true, say unhappy targets.â ABC reporter Karen Barlow described how “phone spamming” is âjust one of the new ways that political parties around the world are bypassing the mainstream media.â The complaints lodged with the ACA at the time included the use of unlisted numbers and mobile numbers (which resulted in reports of voters being charged to retrieve the phone message).
There was also speculation, although no evidence is provided, that the Liberal Party connection to Acxiom may have been a useful source of the telephone data. Axciom is a US-based international direct marketing technology company which had (prior to his preselection for the federal seat of Goldstein) Liberal Andrew Robb as its Australian Director. Prior to running Axciom for the Packer organisation, Rob was Liberal Deputy Director, then he was opposition leader Andrew Peacock’s chief of staff, and, in 1990, Liberal federal director. In that job he ran the 1993 and 1996 federal election campaigns for the Liberal Party.
Acxiom in Australia, established in 1999, is âa wholly owned subsidiary of US-based Acxiom Corporation. Until April 2002, Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL) owned 50%. PBL have retained a strategic interest in Acxiom Australia. For 33 years Acxiom Corporation has helped companies integrate and manage their internal customer data to increase marketing efficiency. Acxiomâs stock in trade includes merging customer data from disparate databases, mining this customer data, profiling customers to help companies target their marketing efforts and providing consumer and business data to assist in acquisition or retention strategies. With offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, Acxiom provides these services built for, or tailored to, the local marketing environment.â
In her post-election research paper for the Australian Parliamentary Library, Sarah Miskin wrote that Academics Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen had predicted in July 2004 that electronic phone messaging would be used in the federal election campaign, albeit in a limited way due to its âinfancyâ. She also wrote âVoter reaction to the pre-recorded message calls may have been more positive had the Prime Minister actually made the calls, as one reported comment revealed: At first I thought my God, the Prime Ministerâs calling. But thenâas soon as I realised it was a recorded messageâI just hung upâ. She was quoting from another critical article that appeared in the West Australian titled âVoters hang up on PMâs phone spamâ
Although Miskin repeats claims made in newspapers by the Liberals âthat the calls had helped the Coalition win as many as six seatsâ this could be interpreted as boastful speculation rather than empirical analysis by Liberal campaign managers. Liberal pollster Mark Textor was quoted in the Age saying that the calls would be used in future elections because they had been so effective: âpeople appreciated the fact that they got a direct and unfiltered message from a political leader in a new, effective wayâ.
Miskin writes that âat least one Liberal candidate in the ACT election (held on 16 October 2004) was reported to have opted for the strategy, âbombarding the home phones of 17,500 voters with pre-recorded campaign messagesâ authorised by the Canberra Liberalsâ divisional officeâ. There is no mention of the name of the candidate or if his/her tactic was successful.
Automatic phone messages were used again but in 2007 it seemed that the Liberals had not adapted their techniques or learnt from previous campaigns. Despite intrusive telemarketing calls becoming a real nuisance for many people, to the point where a âDo Not Callâ register had been developed by the Government in response to community anger, the Liberal campaign chose to ignore it. The Labor Party campaign headquarters received numerous complaints about Liberal party automatic phone messages from voters who, as in 2004, claimed that their numbers (including mobile numbers) were not listed publicly or, alternatively, were on the new Australian âDo Not Call Registerâ. These reports were passed on to and known to the media, who also received information from Laborâs campaign spokesperson Penny Wong, how the Labor Partyâs automated phone message was more carefully targeted and the lists used by the Labor Party had specifically only used publicly listed numbers which were commercially available and specifically removed people who were on the new Australian âDo Not Call Registerâ. Unlike the Liberals, Labor had learnt the important lesson from 2004 about the political cost of annoying calls. Even though there was no legislative requirement, the Labor campaign had made the correct decision to carefully avoid calling people who had registered on the new Australian âDo Not Call Registerâ and also chose to remove any publicly listed mobile numbers from the telephone lists which it had purchased.
Although many complaints were received about them, the text of the Liberalsâ 2007 calls indicated that a decision about targeting strategy had been made, if not implemented carefully:
âHello, Iâm John Howard. Iâve taken the unusual step of contacting you with this message to let you know about our fully funded nine point plan to keep our economy strong. It includes: A big boost to the utilities allowance, anew cost of living guarantee for pensioners and surveillance cameras to keep our streets safer. At a time of global financial instability we need to keep the economy strong, secure your retirement and pay for vital services. To keep our economy strong please vote for your local Liberal candidate Peter Slipper. Iâm John Howard and thanks for your time.â
Robocalls are certainly part of the normal campaign routine in the US. A study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in April 2008 showed that recorded calls are moving ahead of mail and personal calls as an increasingly popular form of political advertising. In Iowa, where the presidential campaign season opened, the number of citizens who received at least one robocall was 81 percent.
In a recent newspaper article a US political consultant explained why the calls aren’t going away: âA direct mail piece now costs about 65 cents for every voter it reaches. Each live telephone call costs about 50 cents. But robocalls cost only about 6 cents each, with the price going down with volume.â While some of the calls are little more than a reminder to supporters to get out and vote, robocalls also can go on the attack. In Indiana in May, National Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, used robocalls to ask voters to reject Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the state presidential primary. In South Carolina, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton made her own robocalls to slam another presidential candidate, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. But the celebrity calls may be the most effective, Ross said, because studies show listeners stay on the call longer when it’s someone famous on the line. One consultant said “We did a call with Arnold Schwarzenegger and we found people staying on the line even after it was over, waiting to see if there was more.”
One of the new innovative uses of the internet by political parties in Australia is for secure campaign websites, or âExtranetsâ to facilitate the distribution of campaign information and materials to state branches, MPs, candidates and local campaign teams. Peter van Onselenâs paper On Message or Out of Touch? Secure Web Sites and Political Campaigning in Australia takes a critical view that begins by confusing the terms âIntranetâ and âsecure web sitesâ (commonly referred to as extranetâs in ICT circles, as access is largely obtained via the common Internet and other external networks, rather than through a virtual private network or VPN connection). Van Onselen admits that Intranets are commonly used in the business sector as well as the public sector and yet sees this tool as another example of âwhat has been described in the US as the âpermanent campaignââ rather than a natural evolutionary use of new technology for better internal (and by design, external) political communication. Instead van Onselen argues that Extranets signify âanother important step in the ongoing centralisation of power in political campaigning in Australiaâ and asks if the new ICTs possibly even âshift parties further toward the closed or cartelised form?â These are very critical generalisations to make without analysing the role that extranets have in improving communication efficiencies in any large dispersed organisation. Van Onselen underlines his criticisms of the party Extranet system by explaining how it was used by Howardâs Government Members Secretariat (the GMS was disbanded by the new Rudd Government) to provide tax-payer funded campaign support and how secure websites are âuplifted [author note – should be âuploadedâ] as much as one year before the formal campaign periodâ, thus âdisadvantaging smaller partiesâ. Obvious exceptions to this thesis would be the three current lower house independents and Senator Nick Xenophon, who success has not been affected by Liberal or Labor Extranets.
Greg Barns writes extensively about the Hoard Governmentâs misuse of the GMS in his book Selling The Australian Government: Politics and Propaganda From Whitlam to Howard. He also explains the genesis from Hawkeâs NMLS, Fraserâs GIU and Whitlamâs AGLS.
The GMS was only one aspect of the impressive professionalisation of staff and message which took place when Howard won in office in 1996. Anne Tiernanâs book Power Wwithout Rresponsibility? Mministerial sStaffers in Australian Ggovernments from Whitlam to Howard describes the Liberal Partyâs internal post-1983 Valder Report, which recommended how it would improve its operations by employing and training better political staff once it won office again.
The Literature Review Part 2 â Historical, cultural and systemic comparisons between Australia
Historical, cultural and systemic comparisons between Australia and the US and their political campaign techniques.
This study requires a critical appraisal of any relevant literature and identification of the gaps in the existing literature, particularly Australian research and public documents. Existing literature in Australia and the US can be compared with current practice in Australia and suggestions made for any obvious variations. An important foundation for this is a detailed look into historical evidence of influences from American political techniques in Australian politics. Once I have exhausted obvious sources of historical references I will begin looking at the current well-regarded American campaign manuals and compare them to known Australian practice. Without the historical perspective it could easily be assumed that current Australian practice is wholly derived from current American (or UK, or local ideas) when in fact there may have been a long historical influence or a long local evolution based on a variety of sources. As we will see, there are already strong theories in existence about the global influence of American campaign techniques and this study will help test these theories from an Australian perspective.
John Hart describes many types of âAmerican exportsâ which âhave found their way into the Australian system of government in recent years and been adapted to suit the antipodean variant of the Westminster model.â
There is undoubtedly far more written about American politics, campaigning and political communication than Australian politics. In the book Handbook of Political Communication Research, edited by Lynda Lee Kaid, Everett Rogers writes that Walter Lippmanâs 1922 book Public Opinion was a âmilestone in the study of political communicationsâ. His study identified the importance of mass media in the formation of public opinions and in its democratic function. He pioneered scholarly content analysis of the media, a practice that is now widespread, using it to expose political bias in media coverage.
A thesis by Paul Zagami Marketing, Media, Money and America quotes OâShaughnessy in stating that âthe term political marketing was first applied to political campaigns in the United States in the 1960.â That may well have been the first widespread application in the US, but in From Soapbox to Sound Bite: Party Political Campaigning In Britain Since 1945 Martin Rosenbaum describes a political electioneering manual from 1922 which states âWinning elections is really a question of salesmanship, little different from marketing any branded article.â
Zagami correctly concludes that âthe changes in political campaigning have arisen because parties are in constant competition with one another for the most modern and persuasive campaigning practices.â However Zagami also draws some conclusions which do not reflect the current practice of political campaigning in Australia and in some cases severely conflict with acknowledged best practice. This is one example of his sweeping statements and a counterargument:
âChannels of political communication have been narrowedâ
Channels have multiplied over the past 30 years. Recent additions include cable TV, email, sms and the Internet (in various formats blogs, YouTube, social networking sites)
Zagami states that his theoretical framework is the multi-influence hypothesis outlined by AM Rose (book he refers to is The Power Structure Political Process in American Society, 1967 and also cites âArthur Bentley, EE Schattsschneider and VO Key Jr amongst othersâ). He claims that the âmulti-influence hypothesis is appropriateâ because parties, leaders and candidates are âelitesâ who attempt to persuade groups (primarily swinging voters). The ânetwork of communicationâ is research, TV, print, voter contact, phones, etc and the intended audience is usually passive. Zagami concedes the dearth of relevant Australian literature, apart from the highly respected text by Mills, and resorts to field interviews of mainly Liberal Party operatives to validate his arguments. One problem with Zagamiâs interpretation of the multi-influence hypothesis is that (as he explains on page 4 of his thesis) the focus on âswinging votersâ is based on the increasingly flawed assumption that traditionally partisan voters represent a stable group. Recent elections suggest that all voters have an increasing propensity to swing and voter volatility is becoming a significant factor in all elections. The hypothesis also doesnât explain the dramatic changes in voting patterns that can occur during by-elections, particularly when one party does not contest â that is âstrategic absenteeismâ, as described by Nick Economou from Monash University in his research paper The Trouble-Maker’s Ballot Box?: A Note On The Evolving Role Of The Australian Federal By-election.
Zagamiâs frequent reference to âpartiesâ as a single entity that undertakes a uniform action could be seen as naĂŻve. References to âpartiesâ actionsâ, âparties believeâ and âparties have chosen toâ are used often and should perhaps have been replaced with case studies or specific examples of behaviour in specific campaigns or elections. A similarly sweeping statement on page 54 is âWhereas once a citizen could go to a public rally to debate and heckle a politician or political candidate as they delivered their message, they must now wait until they are invited to participate in a quantitative or qualitative poll before their opinion will be heard and appreciated by party elites.â This is clearly wrong as many public events and debates still occur at the local level as well as the national level, the 2007 election being a very good example as most of the senior ministers, as well as the leaders and many local MPs, participated in debates. Also, not many voters would even be aware if their electorate was being polled, let alone have the patience and will to wait for an opportunity to participate!
A 1996 thesis by Kristine Klugman Democracy and the new Communication Technologies focused âon the political aspects of the changes in Communication Technologies (CTs)â. Klugman poses the question: âAre the new CTs being used to entrench communication power in the politician and political parties or are they helping to make Australia a more democratic country?â Much of her writing is concerned with how new technologies are helping or hindering participation in democracy and the future of political communication. One of her chapters âsurveying the impact of direct mailâ is very interesting from the viewpoint of this thesis and the influence of American campaign techniques on Australian practice. From the viewpoint of the practitioners and their âconventional wisdomâ the verdict is clear: âDirect mail works! We all know that!â said ALP National Secretary Gary Gray 1993 during an interview and also ALP report. The Liberal response indicated careful research to measure the worth of the exercise: âWe monitor (by telephone surveying) after a direct mail-out – (our standing is) usually up 2-3 points,â said Mark Textor in a 1994 interview. Klugman is sceptical that the practitioners are utilising a campaign technique (direct mail) that they have not accurately tested in the field so undertakes a research survey during the 1994 Fremantle by-election. She also conducted interviews with MPs and officials regarding their views about direct mail. Party officers were, unsurprisingly, supportive, as were most marginal MPs who had used it. Klugmanâs survey showed there was no measurable affect on âfloating votersâ (swinging voters). Her measure of the most frequent response to receiving direct mail, from either main party candidate, was âuninterestedâ. Most of the âparty identifiers (people who would not change their vote) remembered more of the content of their own favourite candidateâs letters. One interesting aspect of the survey from a practitionersâ perspective is that of the âfloating votersâ, only a tiny percentage werenât âfairly annoyed by both lettersâ and no one responded that they had changed their vote because of any of the direct mail letters. Obviously there would be other factors influencing their decision and the sample size was quite small (237 voters). Klugman concludes that there is a significant variation between the expectations held by party people and the reaction of voters to direct mail.
Mills describes the evolution of the electronic political advertisement in Australia as beginning in 1925. The early ads in the 20s and 40s reveal that the cult of personality around the leader and his image is not new nor is it fundamentally a product of the new political marketing which evolved in 1960s America.
As political marketing theory became widely discussed a vast amount of work was written testing and challenging various schools of thought. Without outlining its strengths and many weaknesses, I will mention one important study that has been strongly influential in the early debate around political marketing and voter persuasion: Anthony Downâs seminal work An economic theory of democracy which was first published in 1957 and outlined his theory of the ârational voterâ and a model for âelectoral competitionâ in two-party systems which identified the âideological centre groundâ.
When describing the influence of American history on politics and political marketing across the globe in âThe phenomenon of political marketingâ, OâShaughnessy states âSince political marketing is largely an American invention we must look to American history for explanations of the growth of the genreâ. He writes that âAmericans recognise that there is a marketing dimension to any activity or institution that needs money to sustain it⊠therefore it is natural for politics to be marketed in a society where everything else is.â He also wrote âthe weakening of the (Republican and Democrat) Party encourages and sustains political marketingâ, as âthe efficacy of marketing is severely limited where there are entrenched pre-existing loyalties.â
The American Enterprise Instituteâs series Australia at the Polls, which started in 1975, ended in the 1980s. McAllisterâs and Warhurstâs book Australia Votes: The 1987 Federal Flection utilised the 1987 Australia Election Survey, âthe first academic survey of political opinion in Australia to be conducted at an electionâ. The importance of these studies was spelt out clearly in the bookâs preface: âelections are the focus for much of the political activity in democratic societies. As such, elections have traditionally attracted great interest, both from academics and the general public.â They described one of the âcentral features of the 1987 electionâ as âthe increasing role of technocratic campaigning involving centralised public opinion polling, elaborate and expensive television campaigning and presidential, personalised campaigns focusing on the party leaders.â
Australian parties have historically looked overseas for information and ideas about effective political campaigning. Mills begins his 1986 book with a summary of the âarms raceâ which Australiaâs two main political parties had been conducting âover the last decade and a halfâ, since the period Whitlam became Federal Labor Leader, âto find new kinds of market research, new styles of television advertising, new computer applications, in the hope of getting some elusive quantum leap over their opponents.â He describes âa long but silent tradition of Australian politics: the competition for new American-style political technologies.â
âFrequently their search for weapons has led them to the United states, the authentic source and strongest arsenal of the new technology of politics. The first accurate public opinion polls were conducted in the US; the first political TV ads were shot for American candidates; the first in-house campaign pollster was American; the first and biggest direct-mail specialists were American; the first computerised campaign simulations were by pollsters of American politics; the first documented use of a microcomputer in an election campaign was for a local referendum in the town of Bozeman, Montana. For Australians, the lure of these American achievements has proved irresistible.â
Mills suggests that âDespite other fears about the âAmericanisationâ of Australian politics there is one element of the Australian political style that could and should be immediately adopted: the intense and ceaseless commentary that has accompanied the upheaval in new political techniques in the United States. American journalists, academics and practitioners have been debating the validity of the methods for as long as they have been used.â This debate has been largely absent from Australian public and academic discourse, with the majority of references related to American studies. One of the hurdles in the Australian scene has been the party political nature of our professional political class and their reluctance to divulge trade secrets to wider audiences, even though these practices are commonly discussed in US politics. Academics have accused both sides of politics in Australia of restricting access to knowledge and understanding about the campaign strategies and techniques used in our political contests. The contrast with the long history of American literature on campaigning is stark and Mills cites several prominent examples from the 1950s to the 1980s:
1. Stanley Kelleyâs Professional Public Relations and Political Power (1956) was the first detailed study of the new machine men;
2. Since Theodore White began his The Making of the President series of books in 1960 journalists covering elections have been alert to their importance in the behind the scenes campaign;
3. By 1968 Joe McGuinessâs The Selling of the President showed the nasty insides of Nixonâs campaign effort and set the tone for a more aggressive and cynical media coverage of campaigning;
4. In 1972, Joe Napolitan told all in his insiderâs account, The Election Game and How To Win It;
5. Gallopâs descendents , who can now be found on the staff of every Presidential campaign, find their research work scrutinised by a Press Corps that has a fairly good understanding of their methods and influence;
6. A by-monthly industry journal Campaigns and Elections began as a quarterly in the 80s and continues to allow practitioners to swap notes on new technology and in methods;
7. For the media, David Halberstamâs The Powers That Be (1979) painted a realistic picture of the influence of the media organisations themselves;
8. Academic judgements have been provided through Professor Larry Sabatoâs The Rise of Political Consultants (1981), Ed Diamond and Stephen Batesâs The Spot (1984), Kathleen Jamiesonâs Packaging The Presidency (1984), and the journal Public Opinion.
Mills writes that (at the time he wrote his book in 1986) âthere has been no equivalent in Australia of any of these efforts.â In fact, more important and influential campaigning texts have been written in America since 1986. Included amongst them is Bruce Newmanâs Handbook of Political Marketing in 1999, which famously described the application of marketing principals in political campaigns.
Andrew Hughes and Stephen Dann are firm believers in Newmanâs philosophy. In a recent article Liberals Need A New Man At The Top, Hughes argues that âvoters now are acting more like consumers than traditional voters who have voted along class linesâ and partyâs and leaders have to behave in a way âthe market wants, not what the party wants.â
Looking at political studies from a marketing perspective, although not well-known in Australia, has been well-established in the US and Europe. It would be an interesting thesis topic to investigate why âPolitical Scienceâ has a greater public reputation in Australia than âPolitical Marketingâ.
As well as the Handbook of Political Marketing Bruce Newman has also written two other well-known texts, The Mass Marketing of Politics: Democracy in an Age of Manufactured Images (1999), and the Marketing of the President: political marketing as campaign strategy (1994).
Shea and Burtonâs Campaign Craft has also been a very influential campaign text, reprinted and updated several times since 1996. Shea wrote that he intended his book âto bridge the gap between what scholars understood about modern elections and what campaign operatives knew about the processâ, and he did.
In contrast to the lack of Australian books on political campaigning, Peter Loveday wrote in Surveys of Australian Political Science that there were over 20 political biographies written âin each decade from 1890-1970, the peak being 36 for the 1940s.â
The focus on biographies and the lack of political texts frustrates many Australian political writers. Mungo MacCallum laments that the lack of good political writing is largely the result of laziness and puts the blame squarely at our political leadership. In 2005 he described the paradox of âthe worst-read and least articulate generation of politicians in our history, should be the one most concerned with legislating for literacyâ. In 2005 his sights were firmly set on Howard and no doubt he would describe the current Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, all avid readers, in better terms.
The Australian equivalent to the American election campaign publications listed above has been few and far between. Probably the most well-known example is Pamela Williamâs book The Victory, which famously included insiderâs descriptions of the 1996 Australian federal election, from both sides of the political divide.
In a critique published in Policy in 1997, Jason Falinski wrote âThis is the first book in Australian politics that attempts to give readers an inside look at a Liberal Party federal campaign.â
Former ALP National Secretary Gary Gray has been a significant influence in adopting and evolving campaigning technology for the Australian political landscape. We will look at examples later illustrating how his influence in campaigning methods extended to the UK in the early years of the Blair government. In his chapter of the 1997 book The Australian Political System, titled The Political Climate and Election Campaigning Gray explains the essential relationship between technological change and political campaigning: âTechnology affects the way people communicate; politics is about communication.â He cites Mills, mentioning how a further 10 years of changes in technology has introduced more media, more targeted campaigning and more scrutiny.
In 2000 Fritz Plasser conducted an extensive study titled American Campaign Techniques Worldwide which dealt specifically with the âmarket-driven proliferation of American campaign techniques from a global perspective.â
Plasser âconducted interviews with 502 political consultants and leading party managers in the US, Australia, New Zealand, India, south Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, Russia and Eastern Europeâ. He asked them âabout their professional experience and their concepts of campaigning, with the main focus on their professional evaluation of various campaign techniques and communication strategies.â Before looking at his survey results it is worthwhile exploring Plasserâs summary of several important definitions, theories and explanations for the proliferation of American-derived campaign techniques. Importantly he begins by differentiating between âsingular observationsâ of âthe advanced degree of professionalization in election campaign planning, enlisting the services of external communications and advertising expertsâ which âat best reflect the continuing modernization and professionalization of political communicatorsâ but does ânot furnish any proof of a directional convergence and diffusion processâ (which would be reflected in one-way unilateral adoption of specific techniques). Plasser explains the alternative âmodernisation theoryâ being that ongoing structural changes and technological developments common to many societies are resulting in techniques being borrowed from the more advanced, professionalized practitioners. Plasser identifies several âchannels and modesâ of âproliferationâ and âdiffusionâ: â(1) American political consultants working overseas, (2) campaign training seminars and trade journals, (3) donor-driven democracy-assistance programs and foreign visitorâs programs, (4) professional organisations, and (5) academic programs. He lists examples of each of these modes. From an academic perspective, his final example is the most interesting: âprograms like the high-quality curriculum of the Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) at George Washington University, which increasingly attracts mid-career students, also contribute to the diffusion of US campaign professionalism. For people interested in US campaigns, specialised literature and how-to campaign manuals give informative insights into the American style and logic of campaigning.â
Plasser quotes the well-regarded author (GSPM Associate Dean) Dennis Johnson, of the book No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants Are Reshaping American Democracy âThere now is academic and practical training in nearly all aspects of campaign specialties. There are a number of short training institutes, such as those given by both political parties at the national, state and local levels, courses in practical politics at several universities and a fully-fledged masterâs degree program in political managementâ.
On the specific subject of this thesis Plasser recounts interviewing 40 âpolitical consultants and leading party and campaign managersâ in âOceania (Australia and New Zealand)â who âspent, on average, half an hour answering the questionnaireâs twenty seven questions about their opinions and professional attitudesâ. Plasser also quotes a study of thirty five US overseas consultants by Shaun Bowler and David Farrell, which confirms Plasserâs assertion that 57 per cent of his sub-sample of âtop American political consultantsâ have worked overseas. Of the 58 consultants who have worked overseas, 7 percent (4 individuals) claim to have worked as political consultants in Oceania (compared to much larger figures of 64 per cent who have worked in Latin America or 59 per cent in Western Europe). These figures suggest the influence of American political consultants in Australia is much les than in Latin America or Europe.
In an article titled Political Consultancy Overseas: the Internationalization of Campaign Consultancy David Farrell describes how international consultants have contributed to âclear similarities in campaign styles across the worldâ and although âinevitably there is some adaptation to local institutional and cultural contextsâ, âin essence the campaigns are very similarâ.
Of the 40 Aussies and kiwis in his study, Plasser found that 21 per cent (8 individuals) had âcooperated with a US consultant in the last few yearsâ (compared to 30 per cent in Western Europe and 58 per cent in South America). Plasser writes âAustralia is a difficult market for US consultants because they have to compete directly with Australian experts and consulting firms with highly professional campaign know-how. Consultants from the US were first employed in 1969. Since then, the Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party have made use of the know-how of top US consultants, and dozens of Australian Party professionals have travelled to the US before parliamentary elections to familiarize themselves with the latest techniques and innovations of US campaigning. However for advertising campaigns, West European full-service agencies, such as Saatchi and Saatchi, are also employed.â
Soon after Plasserâs study, a Rachel Gibson study in 2001 tried to explain âthe variance in the extent of campaign professionalization among partiesâ. The study, although focussed on US and European examples, was written while Gibson was at the ANU. She identifies that conservatives in the US and the UK were the first to professionalise their campaign techniques, and we know the same to be true in Australia based on the Mills research into the Menzies campaign in 1949. Two factors she describes ring true in the Australian context: that âadoption of the new marketing technology happens usually after a heavy election defeatâ and âideologically, the principals of marketing and use of outside consultancy firms underpinning professionalised campaigning are more consistent with the principals of a right-wing party.â
Mills reinforces Plasserâs views when he uses an economic metaphor to juxtapose a âfree marketâ and âmixed marketâ of âpolitical entrepreneurism subject to government intervention.â In an American system, where voting is optional, candidates are pitted against each other rather than their opponents parties, where the supremacy of freedom of speech undermines regulation on expenditure and defamation â all these contrast with the Australian system. Mills concedes that examples of government regulation and intervention in Australia still âstop well short of the level in European democracies which, for examples, prohibit political parties from buying TV time.â
Evidence of the âthe advanced degree of professionalization in election campaign planning, enlisting the services of external communications and advertising expertsâ which Plasser theorizes is almost inevitable exists in Millsâ account of the Liberal Partyâs self-analysis after Fraser lost to Hawke in 1983. âColin Curnow and other Masius executives offered their advice to the Liberalâs ⊠that it was not good marketing practice to endeavour to reach the vast audience of every person over 18 years in a campaign spanning (only) three weeksâŠand thus the Party shifted to the long-term campaign, and in doing so it explicitly accepted the model of commercial marketing to achieve its political goals.â Mills includes some detailed statements from Stephen Litchfield, NSW Liberal Director during the Greiner years, in which Litchfield likens marketing strategies for cornflakes, coke and beer to âthe way you ought to market political partiesâ before lamenting âthe difficulty in politics of course is politicians donât like to be likened to beer. They all have their own gut feeling as to what ought to happen. They all know better.â
Mills describes how Litchfield used his recent trips to the US to study the latest direct mail marketing techniques to great effect. âIn September 1983 a letter over Greinerâs signature was mailed to thousands of potential Liberal voters⊠Enclosed was a âcritical issues surveyâ, a questionnaire seeking responses to questions about union power, corruption and other issues which the Liberals thought could run their way. The survey had several aims â spreading the message, raising funds, getting names and addresses for future mailings. But it was most strikingly used as a basis for an ad campaignâ which went to air a whole year before the next election was due.
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Mills writes how many of the news organisations now commissioning their own polls have âcreated some problems of imbalance in their own political coverageâ because âin-house polls are naturally reported extensively by the newspaper or TV station that paid for them⊠But sometimes no-one is left in the media to summarise without vested interest the overall state of knowledge about public opinion and to assess whether polls in general are performing well.â
This phenomenon, which Mills referred to in 1986, was repeated again in 2007 during the federal election when what is best described as a âflame-warâ erupted between the Australian newspaper and several bloggers well-known within Australian psephology circles. A barrage of emails, editorials and letters, both online and in print, (commonly referred to as âthe Newspoll warsâ) displayed how bloggers and online scrutiny were able to undermine the âspinâ with which some newspaper journalists were misinterpreting their polls.
Decades after their peers in the US, Australian journalists are increasingly viewing political research with suspicion and less likely to accept âsecret party researchâ at face value. A recent article by newspaper journalist Peter Hartcher describes his surprise and offence at being provided what he describes as âbiased internal Labor Party researchâ about Peter Costello from the 2007 federal election campaign.
Mills describes how in 1982 the Liberals State Director in NSW, Stephen Litchfield, used new direct mail techniques he had learned from the US direct mail guru (and ultra-right-wing publisher) Richard Viguerie and an official of the Republican Party, to conduct a successful fundraising drive (which won an award from the Australian Direct Marketing Association) and wipe out a $2 million debt. Copies of the written 1982 agreements between the Liberal Party (signed by Litchfield) and the American direct mail and fundraising expert are included in the index of the Zagami thesis.
But Mills explains âFifteen years before Litchfield brought home direct mail from the US, it was the Labor Party that was looking to America for inspiration in planning the first truly modern political campaign in Australia.â Adelaide was where this ground-breaking approach was being taken. âDon Dunstanâs re-election campaign for Premier became the first Australian campaign to use the American formula: sophisticated opinion research and extensive television advertising, both borrowed originally from the world of American corporate marketing.â Mills describes how in âPlayford to Dunstan,: The Politics of Transitionâ, it is revealed that the âALPâs advertising agency acquired â through its American parent â copies of a series of advertisements used in the previous year by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and reworked them for Dunstanâs ads.â
In the book Playford to Dunstan the 1966 Rockefeller ads were âregarded by media men in the United States as a model of television electioneeringâ and âhad been produced by an American agency noted for its policy of communicating with the consumer through a kind of dialogue, rather than bludgeoning him.â
Mills writes âIn 1972 Labor repeated the formula at the federal level, sweeping to power for the first time in 23 years. The slogan âItâs Timeâ had been thought up by Paul Jones, a Sydney ad executive nicknamed âVery Big Statesideâ for his immersion in the jargon of Madison Avenue.â
âThe success of the âItâs Timeâ campaign institutionalised market research and mass TV advertising in Australian political practices. It rewrote the book, setting new high water marks for centralised and costly electioneering. In the same year, David Coombe, who had been Dunstanâs public relations officer in the 1968 campaign, visited the US to observe the Nixon-Humphrey presidential campaign and met up with two of Americaâs foremost political consultants, Robert Squire and Joe Napolitan. For Combe, who became federal Secretary of the ALP in 1973, plugging into the Squire-Napolitan network of consultants and political technicians meant regular contact with the nerve centre of the new political style.â
Zagami uses a quote from Newmanâs Marketing of the President to claim that the Itâs Time campaign âhad the three key ingredients of a marketing campaign: market segmentation, product positioning, strategy formulation and implementation, [Isnât that 4 ingredients?] but does not go into detail about which aspects of the campaign represented those ingredients. Zagami writes without having worked in an electorate office or on a marginal campaign. Trying to illustrate the narrowing of communication channels, he states that âInstead of parties and the public communicating with each other through a wide range of channels, almost all information that flows between the parties and the public now passes through narrow means of market research and televisionâ. When this thesis was written in 1997 several media channels (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, cinema, video) helped communication information to voters, as well as public meetings, word of mouth, election campaign materials, etc And if communication from voters to MPs had to be vetted by researchers the machinery of government (and opposition) would quickly come to a grinding halt.
In a familiar story, the loss to Labor in 1972 was a âwake-up callâ to the Liberal machine. Mills describes how in 1973 the Liberal Party began âreviewing and enlarging its research and public relations functions.â Although they missed their mark in 1974 (in circumstances in which Mills describes in-fighting between the advertising agency and Liberal leader Snedden) Liberal research, message and tactics finally came good in 1975. Mills describes Liberal advertisers Masiusâs ads for the 1975 campaign (âTurn on the lightsâ and âThree dark yearsâ) as âamong the finest, most inventive and powerful ever produced in Australia.â
Any election review will inevitably call for fresh ideas and outside expertise. But American expertise has not always been welcomed with open arms in Australian politics. Interestingly, Mills notes that although it was deemed perfectly acceptable to send Australians to the US to study with and learn from American consultants, it was deemed inappropriate to employ them during Australian elections. He writes that in 1975 âCoombe and other Labor strategists considered bringing Napolitan to Australia to help boost the fading political fortunes of the Whitlam Government. The plan fell through for fear it would leak and cause more damage than benefit.â
Various Australian academics have made attempts to uncloak the internal machinations of the political party campaign professionals in recent years. One of the more widely read books on this topic is The Persuaders: inside the hidden machine of political advertising by Sally Young, a Melbourne Academic who has become a leading research authority on the way politicians and parties use modern media to political advantage.
What we donât see in Australia is a flurry of post-election books and analysis from recognised experts. A regular Australian Electoral Study at ANU has filled a gap in political research that was once most comprehensively filled by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-of-centre Washington Think Tank that once produced a regular post-election volume of articles by Australian Academics. The AEI study has covered every Australian election between 1975 and 1983.
From Millâs book itâs clear that evidence exists new campaign techniques were being eagerly applied at the national and state levels, but not much advanced (or unadvanced) local campaigning took place in the much larger number of âsafeâ seats prior to the 1980s. In the Australian Journal of Management publication âThe Campaign Managers – The 1988 NSW Election Campaign – by the people who ran itâ Barrie Unsworth states âwe could no longer be so arrogant in expecting that an ALP How To Vote card in a safe seat would deliver us 50% plus one of the voteâŠ. We had to campaign much more effectivelyâŠâ
Zagami points to several examples of where parties in Australia have attempted to score political points against their opponents by labelling their opponents activities as âAmericanâ or âAmericanisedâ. Labor has done it recently in its message that the Howard government was âAmericanisingâ our health system, or our education system, or our workplace laws. Zagami writes of an episode where Keating accused Hewson of âbringing in the worst of American politicsâ. Zagamiâs thesis is very well written and includes great insights into political campaigning and the mindset of some of his subjects. Zagami writes that âDespite the compelling evidence, Australian political parties are quick to deny any substantive links with parties and political consultants from overseas, particularly from the US. Lynton Crosby claims that the percentage of techniques and methods used in Australia that originated in the US âwould be closer to zero than anything elseâ. Susan Cavanah, the director of the CLP, says that the CLP have never used campaigning techniques pioneered overseas, even though the CLP have used qualitative and quantitative polling, television advertising, direct mail, negative advertising and allegedly push polling.â
Although he is certain of the American influence, Mills also quotes examples of non-US influences on Australian political campaign techniques. He writes that âCanada has been an important source of ideas about direct mail techniquesâ and âthe ALP borrowed from New Zealand a system of computerised data management to aid doorknockingâ. Mills also describes a âthriving international network of individual consultantsâ The international Association of political consultants âincludes a small band of Australian consultants. One of the Australians, lobbyist and veteran Liberal party consultant Jonathon Gaul, served on the IPAC board of Directors.â There is a two-way street of political campaigning ideas and techniques being shared around the globe. This is nothing new. Mills also describes the example of how âThe advertising agency for the British Conservative Party, Saatchi and Saatchi, looked at the Liberalâs ads produced for Malcolm Fraser in drawing up their campaign for Margaret Thatcher.â
Elaine Thompson lists a large number of Australian political campaigners who have gone to the US to study campaigning techniques in her chapter Political Culture in the book Americanization and Australia. She writes âOf the key party machine men of 1996/97, David Epstein, Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition; Mark Textor, chief pollster to the LPA and the CLP; Mark Arbib, NSW ALP Organiser; Qld ALP organisers Wayne Swan and Mike Kaiser, have all spent time in the United States observing campaigns in detail. In 1996 Arbib attended a political consultantâs conference and in 1997 the Australian Democrats employed the American political consultant Rick Ritter, who had worked on Clintonâs campaign and later worked in the United Kingdom on Tony Blairâs successful election.â
Recent discussions with Andrew Leigh from the Australian National University suggest that better evidence-based analysis of campaign techniques exists in American academic journals. This is to be expected given the larger volume of work would come from a larger number of US-based academics and institutions. One would also assume that the nature of the political industry in the US, with its relatively enormous number of professional consultants competing against each other for reputation and business, feeds a competitive and regular publishing and advertising imperative. Professional campaigners in Australia on the other hand are still largely employed by Parties and have a greater incentive to keep their innovations, techniques and competitive advantages within their professional circles. Examples of recent US and UK studies and articles on campaign techniques (such as those with randomised field experiments) include: The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment. Constituency campaigning in parliamentary systems with preferential voting: Is there a paradox? ; Partisan mail and voter turnout: results from randomized field experiments ; and Voting May Be Habit-Forming: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment .
Similar Australian studies are much rarer but can be found. Interestingly, the authors are usually not necessarily home grown, for example Rachel Gibson is a prominent political scientist based in the UK and Ian McAllister started his political science career there. Their study Does Cyber-Campaigning Win Votes? Online Communication in the 2004 Australian Election looked at the electoral potential of cyber-campaigning.
Ian McAllister was also a co-author of The Electoral Connection in Australia: Candidate Roles, Campaign Activity, and the Popular Vote, a study which measured the electoral effect of various campaign activities on electoral outcomes, based on 1990 Australian election data. The study relies on self-reported election campaign activity such as speaking at public meetings, talking to media, planning and organising the campaign, door knocking and letter boxing, and raising money for the campaign.
It is important to also cite counter-arguments to political marketing theories. Phil Harris argues that one is âpolitical parties and candidates are complex intangible products which the voters cannot unbundle and thus have to decide on the totality of the packageâ. In his paper Political marketing and political communication: the relationship revisited, he highlights some of the unresolved theoretical conflict between political scientists and marketing experts such as the different requirements needed to describe strategy and technique.
Blumler and Gurevitch note the similarities in the use of the terms âglobalisationâ and âAmericanisationâ when discussing politics, economy, culture and the media throughout the world. Their study of the US presidential election in 1996 and UK general elections in 1997 confirmed findings they had made in the previous decade that both systems were changing rapidly and âareas of national divergenceâ were emerging âalongside ongoing processes of convergence.â The significant differences they noted included aspects of campaign finance, media commercialisation, volume of coverage, new-found populism styles of mainstream journalism. This study then revisited the framework for the original comparative analysis, something which would be beneficial (time permitting) in an US-Australian comparison.
An important consideration in political perceptions is the significance of American media in Australian culture. In the introduction to his study of political campaigns Political campaign Strategy, doing democracy in the 21st century Stephen Stockwell utilises three movie references, all American, to describe the nature of modern political communications: The Simpsons, The West Wing and Wag the Dog. Stockwell goes on to explain how, as âdemocracies became mass societies, the old networks of personal contact no longer held sway and prospective representatives had to find new ways to gather the votes they needed to win election. The advent of new media such as offset printing, radio and television prompted the creation of new persuasion techniques such as advertising and public relations to take commercial messages to the masses and politicians were quick to recognise the usefulness of these media for their own persuasive purposes.â Other American movies which Stockwell refers to in his list of âfictional campaignsâ would also be familiar to Australian psephologists: The Distinguished Gentleman, Speechless, The War Room (documentary), Primary Colours and Spin City.
The subject of the popular West Wing series often comes up in political and academic circles. A recent episode of the language program Lingua Franca on ABCâs Radio National discussed the influence and relevance of this example of American political theatre from an Australian perspective. âHere in Australia, our 2007 federal election campaign looks more quasi-presidential than ever: the major parties and the media are encouraging us to see it very much as Howard versus Rudd. But after The West Wing we know that John Howard is no Alan Alda and Kevin Rudd is no Jimmy Smits. We know from past experience that we won’t have an open, free-ranging debate between the leaders. We’re unlikely to have more than one debate; it will be very controlled, and there’ll be no debate between the deputies [authorâs note: this transcript was written well before the formal campaign and as it turned out there were actually a surprisingly large number of televised debates between Ministers and their Shadows in the final weeks of the 2007 campaign] âŠ. One thing we can take from political theatre as good as The West Wing is a spark of interest in public affairs, and respect for the seriousness of the political decisions we make.â
There is an indisputable obsession with American politics amongst Australian journalists, particularly political journalists. On Sunday 29 June 2008 Australians awoke to a morning after the rocky by-elections in the federal seat of Gippsland and the state seat of Kororoit, both in Victoria. On this politically significant morning begging for analysis and discourse, where was the host of Australiaâs premier political talk-show âInsidersâ broadcasting from? Washington! Barry Cassidy was reporting from Washington because âthe primaries were finally over and the real race for the white house had begunâ! Do many Australians even know what a primary is? Leigh Sales from the ABCâs other flagship political program Lateline was already in Washington for the whole previous week.
The Australian media often works in the U.S., for U.S. corporations/owners, and watches lots of American television and Internet news. They sometimes see Australian politics through American political understanding (e.g. Milne and others misquoting polling research, using American terms like âinside the beltwayâ etc.). This view is contagious. However, the size and nature of American political industry and scholarly research means it has a critical mass which doesnât exist anywhere else. Because of its size itâs a natural home to expertise and innovation in this field and will natural have a strong influence around the world.
Despite the media and reporting obsessions, perhaps the influence in Australia is constrained by our unique parliamentary and electoral system? Studlar and McAllister note that âAustralia contains elements of both the British and American political systems, combining a strong party system and parliamentary institutions with a federal constitution. Despite nationally focussed federal elections, internal party selection procedures and campaign support for candidates differs considerably from party to party and even from state to state.â
Studlar and McAllister also state that âalthough the Australian conception of political representation derives more from the British practice than from the American practice, party domination is probably more acute than in virtually any other liberal democracy.â And they observed that âthe major focus of (candidatesâ and politiciansâ) political activity, as well as their election prospects, is party- rather than constituent-based.â
In an article about the new independent Senators who reclaimed the âbalance of powerâ in 2008, The Clerk of Senate Harry Evans stated “It’s obvious that party discipline in Australia is far, far tighter than it is in any other place. It’s just part of the Australian political culture.”
Beanâs study The Personal Vote in Australian Federal Elections, which showed the âpersonal voteâ had a lower value in Australian federal elections compared to the US and UK, is cited as further evidence âto support the view that party factors rather than local factors are preeminent within the Australian political system.â
The reasons for the centrality of parties within the Australian system are many, but they include the system of compulsory voting, which guarantees that parties remain on the centre stage of Australian politics, and Australian political culture which values the utilitarian goals of regulation and efficiency over freedom and liberty, which dominate American and British political culture.
Leon Epsteinâs A Comparative Study of Australian Parties in 1977 began by explaining the ease with which British comparisons can be made of Australian politics, given its Westminster traditions as well as the âabsence in the United States of British-style responsible parties.â He sees the âpotent structural federalismâ that exists in Australia as well as the early appearance of an organised Labor party is unique qualities which have strongly influenced the evolution of the local political culture.
Events prior to Australian federation include elections mark the earliest recorded exchange of political technology between America and Australia and are described by Stephen Mills: âMore than a century ago, one of the very first exchanges of political know-how went the other way, from Australia to America. In the post-Civil War years, American voters going to the polls used to be handed ballot papers printed by the Parties naming all their endorsed candidates for the positions being filled; the electors would simply take the appropriate ballot and stuff it in the box. This made voting in secrecy almost impossible since Party men could watch whose ballot ended up in the box. In search of an improvement, the Americans looked to the radical gold-fields democracy in the Southern Hemisphere where several of the Australian colonies, led by Victoria in 1865, had pioneered the secret ballot. The innovation of casting votes on ballots provided by the authorities, not the Parties, is still called the âAustralianâ ballot in American political science text books.â Mills is mostly correct. Like many things in America, they are reluctant to acknowledge foreign derivations and also refer to the secret ballot as the Massachusetts ballot since Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to use the secret ballot. But perhaps neither Australia nor Massachusetts deserve so much credit because Article 31 of the French Constitution of 1795 states that All elections are to be held by secret ballot. âArticle 31. – Toutes les Ă©lections se font au scrutin secret.â
Brian Costar writes in his chapter about the unique Australian electoral system in Government Politics Power & Policy In Australia that âwhen the new Commonwealth of Australia legislated its electoral procedures in 1902 they mirrored the British and American procedures in two major respects. First, voting and enrolment were voluntary. Second, the electoral system was based on a simple plurality system where the candidate in each electorate who won the most votes (even if not a majority of all votes cast) was declared the winner of that seat.â But improvements were sought to make the system fairer and the â1911 requirement that compelled eligible voters to enrol to vote, extended in 1924 to a compulsory vote. In 1918 the plurality system was replaced by the preferential method. It is the combination of these two practices in elections for the House of Representatives which continues to make Australiaâs electoral system unique.â
Ian McAllister writes in a chapter titled Australian political culture, from New developments in Australian politics that egalitarianism has long been established in Australian political institutions and differentiates it from many western democracies, including the US. He cites examples of Americans lagging behind in female franchise, secret ballots, paid elected representatives, and utilitarianism.
Many historical examples exist which demonstrate the closeness with which Australians identified with the US and its culture, including its political culture and traditions. In the early 1900s, Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, in a letter to US President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote âNo other federation in the world possesses so many features of likeness to that of the United States as does the Commonwealth of Australia, and I doubt whether any two peoples can be found who are nearer in touch with each other, and are likely to benefit more by anything that tends to knit their relations more closely.”
John Hart describes how the exchange of ideas between the US and Australia is recorded in the 1890s during the drafting of Australiaâs Commonwealth Constitution Bill, described by âone of the leading players of the federation movement, George Gibbsâ, remarked that the draft âleans too much towards American terms and constructions (whole pages are merely a paraphrase of the American Constitution).â
Hart also describes how âthe propensity to borrow ⊠practices from the US in any significant degree has been confined mainly to the post-1972 period â a period in which students of Australian government also began to challenge conventional wisdom about the relevance of the Westminster model to the Australian system.â
Elaine Thompson wrote a piece describing the Australian system as the âWashminster Mutationâ in 1980.
Hart makes the important distinction between systems of government and political behaviour âparticularly in the context of the media and electionsâ and reminds the reader that âAustralia has not imported American-style presidential government, nor even a watered-down version of it⊠the structural differences between the two systems remain vastâŠ. Assertions about the presidentialisation of the Australian Prime Ministership all too often embody notions of presidential power that are far removed from reality.â Hart describes how the changing role of the Prime Minister in Australian government âis attributable to two major factors: the growth of government itself and the development of the mass media⊠particularly the intrusion of television into Australian politics.â Hart cites Colin Seymour-Ure who wrote in British Press and Broadcasting since 1945 that the amount of time that prime ministers must devote to media work has increased.
Consequently, âAustralian prime ministers now do a lot of things that American presidents do because the consequences of televisionâs intrusion into politics is almost universal.â Hart uses the example of the American practice of televised presidential-style debates between leaders, which have become part of Australian campaigns since 1983. He describes how the portrayal of prime ministers in Australian media as the âpersonification of governmentâ inevitably âgenerates the impression that government is led by one person, then we ought not to be surprised if commentators start to talk about presidential government in Australia.â
In Political Culture, Americanization and Australia Elaine Thompson writes that although the âAustralian federal constitutional system was drawn in part from the American model, âAustralian federalism is far from a clone of the Americanâ and our federal system âwas transmuted into a uniquely Australian version of federalism.â 28 pages 47-61
Much of the confusion in the media and public about âAmericanisationâ and âpresidentialismâ probably stems from overt mimicking of some common US practices, such as Presidential debates. Australiaâs leaderâs debates, often referred to as âthe Great debateâ in the TV promotions, are modelled on the famous Kennedy-Nixon Presidential debates of 1960.
But some things have clearly not been mimicked, such as the widespread use of consultants in the US. Campaign management in Australia is still the bailiwick of the political parties. Although the technology they use is predominantly American in origin. Most new American communication and campaign technologies end up being adopted some years later but most western democracies, not just Australia. Even the terminology can be contagious with terms like âsound-biteâ, âphoto opportunityâ and ânews managementâ all American in origin.
Part of the purpose of this thesis is to develop explanations for why some aspects of American campaign techniques and practice has been adopted, but not others. There will be examples shown later of how the technology has been adopted but itâs use has been adapted or constrained by Australian context. Mills notes that âwith the advent of the economic and political dominance of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, export of American political campaign technology became widespread.â This was exacerbated by the âweakness of American political partiesâ, âapparently infinite availability of campaign fundsâ and âa vast and innovative commercial industry of advertisers and researchersâ. Although the penetration of American political consultants (and their traditional as well as innovative techniques) has been recorded in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, Australia has remained (relative to cited example nations like the Philippines, Venezuela, Panama) untouched by American consultants. But Mills also quotes Robert Squire that âit is only a matter of time before an American (consultant) is hired in Australiaâ. Squire states that he âis regularly visited by Australians seeking advice about his workâ and is âcontent to have them sniffing around the field for the time-beingâ but also predicts âthe second consultant will be hired [by an Australian client] the week after the first oneâ and âwhen the dam breaks we want to have a relationshipâ.
Sally Young wrote, quoting a US source in 2005, that there are an estimated â3,000 firms, employing about 7,000 professionals in the US who work on political campaigns and political PRâ and that one tenth of the multi-billion dollar yearly expenditure on political campaigning in the US was ârevenue to consultantsâ and for the past 20 years âevery major candidate in the US has used political consultantsâ.
This is in stark contrast to Australia where, as Mills and Young state, most full-time campaign professionals are employees (or regular contractors) with the two main parties. Young also points out that âunlike the US, the advertising agencies used in Australian political campaigns are not specialists.â But this might be a symptom of the relevant size of our campaigns. For example, if we compare campaigns in Australia and the US based on similar expenditure we would expect to find less specialisation and more âgeneralistsâ employed as campaigners, along the same lines as full-time campaign professionals employed in the larger party secretariats in Australia.
A recent study in the US by Farrell, Kolodny and Medvic, Parties and Campaign Professionals in a Digital Age: Political Consultants in the United States and Their Counterparts Overseas concludes that âelection campaigns have outgrown the institutional limitations of political parties, requiring a role for campaign professionals to fill this increasing gapâ and âthere seems little doubt that political consultancy is still in its ascendencyâ. If that is the case in the US, where the DNC and RNC employee upwards of 300 people at their campaign headquarters during election years, then the need to employ specialist contractors and consultants in Australian election campaigns would be even greater, although the financial limitations would be greater as well.
Australian political consultants have also made a name for themselves overseas. Examples will be detailed later of recent appointments of former Liberal Party National director Lynton Crosby by the Conservatives in the UK and the Nationals in New Zealand as have been reported widely (and negatively â itâs clear that Australians arenât the only ones prepared to criticise foreign influences in our home-grown democracy) in the media in both the UK and New Zealand.
In 1988 Stephen Mills noted in the Australian Journal of Management publication âThe Campaign Managers – The 1988 NSW Election Campaign – by the people who ran itâ that although âthe body of published material about Australian election campaigns is growing rapidlyâŠthere is still a shortage of quality literature which can boast the active collaboration of campaign decision makerâŠâ The quantity of literature has increased since the 80s (although partisan debate amongst authors and political scientists still lingers about the quality) with more recent famous titles such as âThe Victoryâ by Pamela Williams and âInside Kevin 07â by Christine Jackman. Mills then admitted that the idea for their post-election conference and publication was âborrowed from the American model â which gives it something in common with many other innovations on the Australian electoral scene. The Institute of Politics of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has hosted conferences of Presidential campaign managers since 1972, and it was these which provided the model of the Sydney conference.â
There are other examples of Australian political science research directly following paths previously laid down by American academics. In 1994 Studlar and McAllister replicated an American study of how MPsâ re-election considerations dominate their behaviour, showing that in Australia incumbent MPs ârely on national partisan forces for re-election, while challengers rely much more on their own efforts.â
In her paper Scare Campaigns: Negative Political Advertising in Australia Sally Young describes several fundamental differences between the Australian and American systems which affect campaign techniques, including:
1. In Australia, there is certainly some fear of, and even contempt for, American campaign practices as well as American social and political values.
2. Unlike U.S. presidents, Australian prime ministers are not directly elected. In order to form government in Australia, the winner must obtain a majority of seats in the House of Representatives. The Prime Minister must ensure that their party as a whole polls well, so historically, Australian political advertisements have tended to be more party-focused.
3. Compulsory voting ensures high voter turn-out, therefore, unlike their American counterparts, Australian politicians do not need to spend a great deal of time and money during election campaigns on encouraging voters to turn up to vote, in their advertising; they can concentrate on persuading voters how to vote.
4. In Australia, political ads are still generally confined to the four weeks immediately preceding polling day. By contrast, much of the American literature on political advertising is concerned with presidential election campaigns which run over a much longer period of at least nine months from the primaries to polling day.
5. In the US, television advertisements (or âspotsâ) are âwidely used, not only in presidential, state and local elections but even in local school board elections. In Australia, even in federal elections, individual candidates can rarely afford their own television advertisements.
6. In the US, party élites have lost much control of the campaigning process to consultants from outside the party but in Australia, the political parties are still very strong. They exercise a tight reign over who becomes an MP and how they vote. Here, the parties have significant control over the conduct of the election campaign, they hire the consultants and advertising agencies, and they disperse the all-important campaign funding.
7. Funding for Australian federal elections is on a much smaller scale than in the US and also incorporates a very significant level of public funding.
8. There are also significant cultural differences in the style and content of American and Australian political advertising.
9. In Australia, the parliamentary system establishes a very adversarial relationship between the two major parties and indeed, the two party leaders. By the time an election is held, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition may have faced each other across Parliament for years questioning, heckling and sometimes, insulting, each other.
Whereas big differences between the UK and Australian systems exist in terms of the combination of compulsory voting, federal systems (which encourage state-based messaging) and allowance of paid TV advertising. In Australia this leads to much greater campaign expenditure on TV advertising. Sally Young states that âIn practice, Australiaâs lack of (TV advertising) regulation and the reliance on TV advertising is closest to the United States and Taiwan.â
Wattenberg compared the level of âparty identificationâ in the Anglo-American democracies and found that while the âproportion of party identifiers has remained fairly stable in Great Britain, Australia, and Canadaâ (at greater than 80%), there has been a sharp decline in the United States, from 77% in 1964 to only 63% in 1980. All four democracies remain relatively stable and for an external observer there systems may seem very similar though there are fundamental systemic differences in electoral laws, political parties and campaign practice.
Looking at some examples of the impact of American TV and online culture on Australian politics (and other English-speaking nations), itâs easy to see why the Australian media is so obsessed with American politics; itâs very entertaining if itâs done well.
In an ABC Radio National program, Background Briefing on 19 March 2006 titled âPost-modern politicsâ Wendy Carlisle reported she was âon a search for truth in a world full of crazy language laundering, upside downism and political spin.â Carlisle noted the emerging influence of US comedy shows such as John Stewartâs The Daily Show and itâs more politically biting offshoot The Colbert Report as modern influencers of political thought and information.
This view is corroborated in the US media. A recent New York Times article describes the emergence of The Daily Show âas a genuine cultural and political forceâ and âa study this year from the Pew Centreâs Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that The Daily Show is clearly impacting American dialogueâ and âWhile the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls âthe coolest pit stop on television,â with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests.â
In a paper discussing the growing influence of âinfotainmentâ on politics, Stockwell noted that âTraditional TV news and current affairs programs (both in the US and in Australia) are shrinking in terms of audience reach and thus significance to public discourse.â He lists several Australian examples âwhere younger audiences are drawn to new forms of current affairs programming such as comical news and current affairs including Frontline, Good News Week and The Panel that offer a humorous and sarcastic approach to reviewing contemporary news and current affairs reports in other media.â Of course, political TV comedy in the UK is also renowned for its accuracy and influence in Australia. âYes Ministerâ and âYes Prime Ministerâ are not only closer in style and language to Australian humour but they are also more politically relevant in a Westminster system like Australiaâs. And if you read the account of Alan Milburnâs influence in the Kevin07 campaign, as recorded in Christine Jackmanâs book Inside Kevin07. The people. The plan. The prize then there is substantial evidence to suggest strong UK influences in Australian political strategy and message.
The premis of most the comedies set on a political stage, as well as the comedies which thrive off the critique of modern politics and rhetoric, is the concept of âspinâ and âinformation managementâ. A lot of detailed research exists about political rhetoric and the language governmentâs use to try and control information flow and manage media and public interest, expectations and criticism. âPublic Relationsâ is not just the tool of government, but government is typically under much higher levels of public and media scrutiny.
Carlisle interviews Peter Oborne, the political editor of The Spectator magazine. âHeâs just made a BBC documentary called The Rise of the Political Liar. His fascinating thesis is that politicians have become walking, talking postmodernists. Politicians, he says, have embraced its central idea that there is no such thing as truth.â
Wendy Carlisle: After a career as a senior bureaucrat which took him to the very top as head of three Federal government departments, including Prime Minister and Cabinet, and then into the corporate world as CEO of Qantas, John Menadue also believes that truth in public life is at an all-time low.
John Menadue: I think it is a much more serious problem than it has ever been. What is different now I think is the scale of the public relations activities, the sophistication and skill with which they operate, and the technology that can be employed instantaneously to get messages around the world.
Wendy Carlisle: A couple of years back, John Menadue became so enraged at the situation he decided to set up his own magazine, New Matilda, from which he campaigns on these and other issues.
John Menadue: What spin does is distorts the truth, and we need in a democratic society, to have a means whereby untruth, error can be corrected. As a result of spin and the inability of under-resourced journalists to combat it, the spinmeisters are able in effect to chloroform the consciences of our community, and thatâs what they did over children overboard. Theyâre suggesting that in fact they were terrorists, they were such awful people theyâd even throw their children overboard, and weâve had more recently of course the Iraq War, and thereâs no more serious issue on which a government can be involved than going to war. And the Howard government deceived us about the reason for going to war. It said it was about weapons of mass destruction, then it changed its mind several times. But the real reason why it went to war was to oblige the Americans, and they claim that it was due to weapons of mass destruction and regime change. But that was all an untruth.
The reason why they went to war, was because they regard Saudi Arabia as an unreliable ally in the Middle East and they needed to find another strategic base in the Middle East in substitute or in replacement of Saudi Arabia; if it had oil, even better.
Wendy Carlisle: When John Menadue was head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Whitlam government was setting in motion the wheels to control information coming out of government.
Menadueâs peer at the time was Labor party icon Graham Freudenberg, Whitlamâs speechwriter and press secretary, the man who wrote the âItâs timeâ speech.
Looking back over that time, Freudenberg says Whitlamâs decision to give every Minister a press secretary laid the foundations for the government media machine we have today.
Background Briefing caught up with him in the lobby of the Holiday Inn at Potts Point in Sydney, on a recent trip.
Graham Freudenberg: We had commitments to the idea of open government, and part of this idea of open government was to release more information. So rather naively, I think, we thought that the way to do that was to equip every Minister with his own press secretary.
Wendy Carlisle: Why was that naĂŻve?
Graham Freudenberg: I think it was naĂŻve to think that press secretaries would facilitate the flow of information, rather than as they did in practice, try to manipulate the flow of information in the interests of the Minister.
So to some extent the present manipulation of information and control of propaganda, you could say originated in 1973 with the Whitlam government.
Wendy Carlisle: And later, it was the Hawke government which refined the propaganda machine even further with the creation of the National Media Liaison Unit, or ANIMALS, as it was fondly known.
Graham Freudenberg: Well I acknowledge that the Hawke government did establish the National Media Liaison Unit.
Wendy Carlisle: This is the one otherwise known as ANIMALS?
Graham Freudenberg: Otherwise known as ANIMALS. And that was an effort at media control in the political interests of the government, and government members.
Wendy Carlisle: Was there any discussion within Labor when ANIMALS was established to the appropriateness of hiring public servants, deploying them in ANIMALS and using them for political purposes? Was that seen as a sort of a corruption of the process of the public service? A politicisation of the public service?
Graham Freudenberg: I donât know what discussions were held at the time, and I canât recall what our perceptions at the time. I imagine though, we were not unduly exercised over it. You know, I canât be hypocritical over this, itâs one of those things that undoubtedly would fall into Gareth Evansâ category of âit seemed a good idea at the timeâ.
Wendy Carlisle: In 1996 when John Howard became Prime Minister, he abolished ANIMALS. Since their election, the Coalition has spent 70% more on government advertising than Labor.
Graham Freudenbergâs observation is that while Labor started the propaganda juggernaut, the communications revolution has changed it into something quite different.
Graham Freudenberg: I suppose Julius Caesar was the first spin doctor. But what is different today is certainly not the loss of any purity of motives, but the sheer pervasion of the operation and of course that itself is partly a reflection of the massive increase in the means of communication. I mean if we call things by what they really are, and if we acknowledge that this huge effort mounted in Canberra with all these public relations offices, media consultants, if we acknowledge that the operation is a propaganda operation, then we face what it is. It is propaganda.
Now propaganda is nothing new. But the means of purveying it are new and revolutionary.
Carlisle continues âSpin of course, has been around since someone persuaded the apes out of the trees. Since the Enlightenment, there has been in the Western world, a sense that truth is possible. Thereâs been an agreement that reason will solve problems, and that information and evidence, with a dash of wisdom, are the foundation stones of good decisions. Postmodernism began to undermine all that with its assault on reality, saying that itâs all relative, and this idea has seeped into education, religion and politics.â
The counterargument is that although new technologies have provided better weapons to the spin doctors, they have also provided unprecedented public access, rapid access, to otherwise unobtainable information.
Carlisle also interviewed the Chairman and CEO of one of the biggest PR companies in the world, Hill & Knowlton. âPaul Taaffe is a Brisbane boy whoâs risen to the very top, and Background Briefing caught up with him at a recent function for the Institute of Public Relations at State parliament.â âPaul Taaffe described a world increasingly fractured along religious and political lines. It was a world, he said, where no-one trusts anyone. In this environment, internet social networking sites and blogs were making the old communication ways, TV, radio and print, increasing irrelevant. It is, quite frankly, said Paul Taaffe, a world full of opportunities for PR professionals.â But Paul Taaffe is also quoted as saying âWe are in the business of truth. Public relations is basically helping governments or companies or even NGOs say what they need to say and say it in the right way at the right time to the right people. And that is not about lies, thatâs about telling the truth. ⊠The reality is, we live in the Google age. There are no secrets. ⊠There may be secrets for a day, but over time there are no secrets. ⊠Public trust has gone down the gurgler. We donât trust politicians. We donât trust the media. So just who should we trust to tell us the truth? He says the PR industry is here to help us.â
Paul Taaffe: What Iâm saying is, no authority figure is trusted. Now what communication professionals do is help you navigate that lack of trust, through that lack of trust. So nobodyâs trusted, nobody trusts governments, nobody trusts large corporations and increasingly the mediaâs not trusted. So who do I trust? Well I trust nobody, I trust other people, I go on internet, I seek like-sided voices.
And in a response to Carslileâs pointed question about âspinâ he responds:
Paul Taaffe: By the way, just a small point: the first person that coined spin was not the media on public relations agencies, it was public relations agencies on the media, because the media, particularly in political environments, and these were political PR people, accused the media of spinning facts or statements coming out of administration. So the first time I ever heard spinning was about 20 years ago in the UK elections when the media was being accused of spinning to a conservative agenda.
Carlisleâs program shows how the UK has been as influential, if not more so, than the US when it comes to our understanding of political spin and propaganda. Later in the same Background briefing, in another interview with the US pollster Frank Luntz a reporter refers to his love for the author George Orwell and âwhat Orwell writes⊠He says, âpolitical language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure windâ.
In his writing about the Greek origins of modern western democracy (and the enduring influence of Aristotleâs Art of Rhetoric), Stockwell saw elections and campaigns as âthe glue of democracyâ but also described how âcontemporary politics offers more opportunities for participation than just electionsâ with the âspread of campaign techniques from electionsâ to various other activities such as âlobbying, public education, activism and issues managementâ.
When describing the importance of âimage communicationâ in modern political campaigning, Stockwell refers to Melderâs conclusion that there is nothing really new in these techniques, in fact âthe campaigns of old (i.e. from the 1800s) were packaged and managed more completely and simplistically â and in some cases more misleadingly â than any modern-day political consultants could ever engineer.â
There is certainly an argument to be made that modern internet technologies have empowered the casual observer with the tools to divulge and expose all manner of embarrassing truths about political activities, language and messages.
American books like Donât think of an elephant by Lakoff and Feldmanâs Framing the debate point to a higher level of academic analysis as well as public interest in political language in the US that is appearing in Australia on a much smaller scale. As well as Stockwellâs book on strategy, with itâs long discourse on classical rhetoric, there have been books by former speechwriters such as Stephen Mills, Don Watson and Graham Freudenburg that reveal a rich appreciation of Australian political language and itâs evolution.
A recent APSA conference paper by Stephanie Younane âMen and Women of Australiaâ: Political Rhetoric in Australian Political Science and Communication points to new sources of quantitative and qualitative analysis of language in Australian political speeches, advertisements, media coverage, campaign material and public statements. No doubt episodes of TV shows like GrassRoots and The Hollowmen as well as documentaries such as the 1984 classic Democracy and the more recent Rats in the Ranks, as well as the David Williamson classic Donâs Party, will provide rich pickings for future academic study of Australian political language. All feature election campaigning activities from strategy and media management to various examples of voter contact techniques. It would be interesting from the perspective of this research to measure how many American-style techniques or descriptions were used in these Australian popular entertainment productions.
Plasser quotes Elaine Thompsonâs entry in the book Americanisation and Australia on the subject of âpolitical cultureâ to highlight perceptions in Australia of the negative consequences of the proliferation of US campaign practice:
âTelevision, advertising, polling and image making have all been transmitted from America to Australia and have helped change the nature of election campaigns, money-raising in politics and leadership style. These changes have helped trivialise issues and turned campaigning and fund raising into capital rather than labour intensive activities. The result is to place further distance between the political parties and the voters, making the parties seem less relevant as vehicles for mass political representation.â
Taken out of context, this isolated view of Thomsonâs seems unreasonably alarmist, given the context of comparatively stronger influences of US techniques in other western-style democracies than in Australia. She also fails to distinguish (as Plasser explains in his 2000 paper) between âAmericanisationâ and âmodernisation and professionalizationâ where âwhat is happening between the US and Western Europe or Latin America (or Australia) is a process of non-directional convergence, which results in an increased similarity between the political communication process in media-centred democraciesâ Plasser cites Gunther and Mughan 2000, Negrine and Papathanassopoulos 1996, Norris 2000, Swanson and Mancini 1996.
Mancini and Swanson write that âaround the world, many of the recent changes in election campaigning share common themes despite great differences in the political cultures, histories and institutions of the countries in which they have occurred.â They pose the concerning question about whether the negative effects of these techniques in the US may be transplanted to their newer hosts or âcan such innovations be adapted to compliment and support the host countryâs indigenous political culture and institutions?â
Thompson answers that question specifically when she states that the American campaign techniques âare incorporated into Australian politicsâ in an environment that âmediates them in dramatic waysâ.
In their article The “Americanization” of Political Communication: A Critique Negrine and Papathanassopoulos argue that âAmericanisationâ is largely a symptom of the âconvergence of practicesâ and âmodernisation of societiesâ. They describe an evolution in UK political communication that has mirrored the adoption of new technologies and political marketing techniques in other countries, led by the US, but not necessarily tied to US practice. They suggest that âAmericanisationâ is perhaps a simplistic term that describes a larger process of social change, where âsnippets of information suggest a complex process of interaction between cultures and practices rather than a unidimensional process.â
Negrine and Papathanassopoulos use an interesting citation from Richard Roseâs Lessons from America. It is that the âidea of Americanisation is not a new one â it was first used in the 1830s as a term of abuseâ.
Similar examples of this pattern of criticism can be found in Dennis Kavanaghâs article New Campaign Communications, Consequences for British Political Parties from the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics where he writes of British Labourâs âscornâ of the Conservatives âfirst useâ of an advertising agency âto write and place advertisements for general elections between 1950 and 1964.â Labour described it as âthe worst form of Americanisationâ and âthe antithesis of policy-based campaigningâ.
In his 1967 study Influencing Voters: A Study Of Campaign Rationality, Richard Rose described how âthe 1959 Labour Party campaign was based upon the explicit rejection of modern media techniques and expertise.â However by 1964 Labour had seen the light and followed the conservative approach to assist it in aspiring to electoral success.
This criticism continues today as the term is commonly used in reference to the negative aspects of political communication which promotes âstyle over substanceâ. One of the critics of this style is Jerry Palmer in an article titled Smoke and Mirrors: Is That The Way It Is? Themes In Political Marketing where he repeats a commonly asked question âabout the changing nature of politics in the UK and US: to what extent is political decision-making driven by presentation?â Palmer concludes that âalthough professional literature about political marketing indeed lays great emphasis on communication as an essential tool of policy development and implementation, it stresses that credibility derives from policy delivery, thus arguing for the primacy of substance over âspinâ, the presence of substance behind the smoke and mirrors.â
In The Media and Political Process Eric Louw from the University of Queensland outlines the influences of US spin doctors on practice in the UK and subsequent importation of the practice into Australia.
One could use the recent examples of the 2007 Australian federal election and 2008 elections in the Northern Territory, and Western Australia and the Australian Capityal Territory to argue that, eventually, voters tire of spin and send underperforming incumbents a strong message.
Scepticism over âpolitical spinâ is one recent reason why voters (in both Australia and the US) are losing trust in politics. In The Prince’s New Clothes: Why Do Australians Dislike Their Politicians? Andrew Leigh explains that this dropping level of trust is happening across the developed world and is not unique to Australia or the US. Leigh lists seven major reasons for this including the media, declining interpersonal trust, and declining levels of trust for all institutions.
There is more comparative literature available on US and UK politics than US and Australian politics. In a paper comparing the adoption of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) by Australian and UK legislators, Rachel Gibson et al examine factors that might help explain the differences in adoption of the new technology. They suggest the following factors affect the adoption of this technology in Australia, relative to the UK: stronger party loyalty reduces individual innovation, federalism encourages localised innovation (countering the earlier hypothesis), the âtyranny of distanceâ would encourage ICT development, cultural diversity would encourage targeted information streams, and higher internet penetration would be a factor in greater use. From an Australian perspective, the first factor rings true. Their research shows no significant difference in the uptake between the two nations, nor does it support their suggested systemic factors. Of more importance is their identification of youth and familiarity with technology as factors in both nations.
One element of Australian politics which differentiates it greatly from US politics is the existence of strong factional allegiances within the major parties, especially at the national level and in the larger states. Although they are disparaged greatly in the media and amongst non-aligned MPs and candidates (as well as former members of a faction!) conventional wisdom has it that factions can play an important managerial and organisational (including campaign advice, mentoring, training and support) role and facilitate internal democratic processes that foster debate as well as help maintain party unity (in theory). Although they existed in various forms in the states for decades, Ian McAllister writes that the first formal federal faction to emerge in the ALP was the National Centre Left (commonly referred to as âthe centreâ) in 1984. Recent internal disputes within the Liberal Party, particularly in NSW, have revealed bitter factional disputes, even though they seem to be less organised than factions in the Labor Party, which many argue are now becoming much less influential. McAllister argues that the factions have played âa significant role, within an organisational hypothesis (by influencing party activists and members) as well as in an electoral hypothesis, by broadening the partyâs electoral appeal.â Although there are loose factions in the US Congress (the blue Dog Democrats for example) they are fluid and primarily concerned with policy issues (such as fiscal conservatism) rather than formal leadership and party organisational functions. McAllister writes that a lack of legitimacy for factions can lead to instability, pointing to the fluid âLabor state factions that existed in the 1950s and precipitated the disastrous ALP spilt in 1955.â This contrasted with the greater factional legitimacy in the 1980s, which directly led to government stability and union harmony.
The Literature Review Part 1 – Preface
This is fairly self-explanatory. A few years ago (2008 to be precise)Â I started a thesis and didn’t finish it. One day I will get back into it. In the meantime. Here are some excerpts for fellow unqualified (academically-speaking) psephologists to read and possibly enjoy. Feedback is welcome.
Please remember, this was written a few years ago. I will endeavour in coming months/years to update parts and add newer articles and references to literature which has been published since 2008, including events and seminars I have attended more recently.
Preface
Using recent Australian campaigns (such as the 2007 Australian Federal election and 2007 NSW State election) the research will compare Australian and American political campaigning techniques and assess the application and relevance of common American campaign techniques and published American campaign manuals in modern Australian politics.
A quick review of recent Australian research on political campaign techniques, as well as popular literature, reveals no published political campaigning texts or ‘manuals’. There are numerous papers and books on different aspects of campaigning, such as books on media advice and numerous political biographies, as well as accounts of recent election campaigns, but no authoritative texts or manuals that look at Australian political campaigning as a whole, detailing all the aspects of campaigning from the foundations (like strategy, message and finance) to the work that goes on in the trenches as candidates and their teams fight for each individual vote. The two closest texts that can be used as examples of public âcampaign handbooksâ in Australia are Millsâ âThe new machine men: polls and persuasion in Australian politicsâ and Stockwellâs âPolitical Campaign Strategy – Doing Democracy in the 21st Centuryâ.
This apparent disparity in publicly available instructional literature, in comparison to the United States could be due to a number of reasons including differences in historical, political and cultural norms, voting systems, the relative sizes of the political institutions and professional class, as well as financial regulations and wealth.
The purpose of this thesis is to produce scholarly research on campaigning techniques in modern Australian politics. This will take the form of at least one refereed journal article to be published, hopefully early next year. The first steps in the literature review will be to outline why this topic is important and the research questions that will be addressed in the thesis.
Why this topic is important
From an academic perspective there is very little research which defines effective political campaign techniques in an Australian context. Australian political scientists have not received the acknowledgement and prominence in professional political circles that their counterparts in the US and UK have and this research will help build a new dialogue between the two groups. It is hoped this research will reveal reliable approaches to interpreting American political campaigning manuals and techniques in an Australian context based on case studies of Australian elections. There is a widely repeated assumption that American political campaign techniques are being adopted by Australian parties, MPs and candidates. If this assumption is true it is important for academics as well as practitioners in this field to understand the limitations (if there are any) as well as the process of adaptation (if there is one). If this assumption is wrong it is important to know why it has been repeated so often and in what context.
At a recent public lecture 2008 Fulbright ANU Distinguished Chair Professor James Lengle described the current conflict of ideas in the 2008 US presidential election between âconventional wisdomâ (how campaign practitioners like to describe and justify their theories and practices) and âpolitical science researchâ (traditional peer-reviewed academic political science). He explained how each purported to have a good explanation of what was likely to happen in the campaign and each professed to understand the relevant factors and yet the result was still (in September 2008) too close to call with any certainty by either group. He surmised by saying that âboth could be wrongâ and in a previous lecture at the USIS in Canberra explained pollsters âcould be looking at the wrong indicators, or misinterpreting the right indicatorsâ! [1]
Some of the primary questions which this research will explore include:
- Is there strong historical evidence of American influence in Australian political campaign techniques or Australian political systems and practice?
- Does literature exist which explains the success, usefulness or relevance of specific American campaign techniques in Australia?
- Have many Australian political professionals trained in the US and have many American political consultants have worked in Australia? Are basic political strategies in Australian politics and American politics similar in style and are campaigning techniques and skills transferable between these two systems? Are Australian political messages and techniques strongly influenced by the most negative aspects of American politics and is this influence likely to diminish or increase?
- Why is the latest Australian campaign technology and innovation seemingly always sourced from the U.S.? Is this popular view based on media bias or fact?
Some of the secondary questions which this research will explore include:
- Are most of our basic political campaign techniques universal?
- Are the methods of âpersuasionâ used to address the growing number of âindependent votersâ in the US and âswingingâ voters in recent Australian and NSW elections similar?
- Is the confluence of access to cable TV and the Internet accelerating and intensifying the influence of American political messages and techniques in Australian politics?
- Apart from political parties what other large organisations have brought ideas and techniques to Australia from the US, e.g. Media, International corporations, NGOs, Unions, etc.
- In comparison to America, are other country’s political environments and methods more or less relevant to Australia e.g. UK and NZ? There are potentially many more published comparative studies that include these examples.
- Some people believe that NZ and UK political techniques are much more relevant to Australian politics and the best lessons from the US are restricted to âmarketingâ or âtechnologyâ lessons.
Definition and methodology
This research will define âAmerican political campaign techniquesâ as political activities such as marketing and persuasion which are largely identified with but not necessarily exclusive to American politics. There is an argument that can be made which says that these techniques are universal but are labelled as âAmericanâ because:
1. Campaign instruction and analysis is documented better in the US
2. There are more campaign professionals and organisations in the US due to the larger mass of the political consultancy industry, media, academia and related professions
3. The larger publishing market available to political commentators in the US ensures that the most popular political studies and books are researched, printed and distributed there.
As stated earlier, the lack of similar material in Australia means that Australian campaigners searching for good campaign manuals will inevitably turn to the US and this research will help ascertain if this is wise or if some American campaign techniques are incompatible with Australian political systems, culture and practice. The authorâs research methodology began with a focus on the literature review by reading any remotely relevant text and research paper. Bibliographies and online databases were searched primarily for descriptions of American campaign techniques, Australian campaign techniques and descriptions of influences in Australian political campaigning. A search was made for any comparative studies and explanations of American campaign techniques in other nations. Most of the initial leads were derived from five sources: Discussions with my supervisor Wayne Errington and supervisory panel members John Hart and Andrew Hughes, Stephen Millsâs book The new machine men: polls and persuasion in Australian politics, Sally Youngâs book The Persuaders: Inside the hidden machine of political advertising (in which Mills is extensively quoted), APSA and its publications and finally, previous research at ANU, namely two thesis: Paul Zagamiâs Marketing, media, money and America, (1997) and Kristine Klugmanâs Democracy and the new communication technologies (1996).
The author quotes Stephen Mills extensively, as do many researchers in Australian campaign techniques. Mills, who currently teaches politics at Sydney University also participated in casual discussions that revealed an extensive and growing interest in this field and will undoubtedly be a valuable contributor in future research by many political scientists in Australia. Although The new machine men: polls and persuasion in Australian politics was written over 20 years go it is still the primary reference for political campaign research relating to campaigning methods in Australian politics and is the best single source for anecdotes and explanations of the evolution of campaigning techniques in Australia in the late 20th century. [2]
For the literature review I will attempt to collate and reading all the related literature that mentions Australian campaign techniques, or mentions American techniques or influences in an Australian context. That knowledge will act as a basis for critical appraisal of the best American literature on campaigning and assess how it compares to current Australian practice. I will begin the task of the literature review using a âbreak and enterâ and âcasing the jointâ techniques, to try and assess what existing academic material is relevant to this topic, after which I can utilise my professional and field experience to critically assess specific texts and use case study examples to further the argument about this subject. The thesis will evolve from interviews with experienced campaigners in Australia as well as analysis of campaign documents and books from Australia and the US.
Due to the rapidly changing political landscape in Australia and the US in 2007/08, some elements of the research will change as more information about current and future campaigns becomes available. As recently as December 2008 new theses from Australian researchers are being published about the 2007 Australian federal election with particular focus on new campaign technologies and campaign techniques. Recently discovered examples include Michael Dalveanâs Targeted Election Campaigning: An Australian Case Study (2006) and Christopher Smithâs Opportunities for Engagement Between the Political Elite and the Citizenry Online: Political Party Websites in the Australian 2007 Federal Election (2008).
To simplify the tracking of historical examples which have been found during the research, as well as starting the process of outlining important sections in the thesis, the citations are grouped using the following sub-headings:
Historical, cultural and systemic comparisons between Australia and the US and their political campaign techniques.
Campaign foundations: strategy, message, finance, research
Comparing the ‘Air War’: advertising, earned media, TV, the Internet and new technologies
The ‘Ground War’: nuts and bolts campaigning techniques
Three American Campaign texts and their local relevance
Discussion, implications, conclusions, continuing research
Personal note
I must state up front to anyone who may read this in the future that I am a full-time employee of the Australian Labor Party and have been a paid up Member of the ALP since 1992 and intend to be for the foreseeable future, along with all my children; So this research has a professional interest for me, as well as a personal one. That said, I have tried to refrain from being too critical of the Liberal Party, as well as being too biased towards Labor people and practices. The contents of these pages are my thoughts alone (apart from places where quotation marks and citations have been used to render the information as close as possible to the original text from which it is sourced). The views expressed and the contents collected do not represent in any shape or manner the views or policies of the Australian Labor Party or the ALP National Secretariat <where I was employed when I started this little project>.
[1] Lengle, A panel discussion on the US presidential election, 2008, Copland Lecture Theatre, ANU,
[2] Mills, The new machine men: polls and persuasion in Australian politics / Stephen Mills, 1986, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic,
Why Blog about election campaigning?
Why am I (and a few others) blogging about campaigning in Australia and New Zealand?
Lots of reasons! A few years ago (back in 2008) a started a thesis and explained: ‘A quick review of recent Australian research on political campaign techniques, as well as popular literature, reveals no published political campaigning texts or ‘manuals’. There are numerous papers and books on different aspects of campaigning, such as books on media advice and numerous political biographies, as well as accounts of recent election campaigns, but no authoritative texts or manuals that look at Australian political campaigning as a whole, detailing all the aspects of campaigning from the foundations (like strategy, message and finance) to the work that goes on in the trenches as candidates and their teams fight for each individual vote. The two closest texts that can be used as examples of public âcampaign handbooksâ in Australia are Millsâ âThe new machine men: polls and persuasion in Australian politicsâ and Stockwellâs âPolitical Campaign Strategy – Doing Democracy in the 21st Centuryâ. This apparent disparity in publicly available instructional literature, in comparison to the United States could be due to a number of reasons including differences in historical, political and cultural norms, voting systems, the relative sizes of the political institutions and professional class, as well as financial regulations and wealth.’
The purpose of that thesis (which I haven’t completed as of 2014!:) was to produce scholarly research on campaigning techniques in modern Australian politics. Since I started it (back in 2008) a lot has been written about campaigning techniques in modern Australian politics by MANY other people, including favourites such as Stephen Mills, Peter Brent, Nick Economou, Brian Costar, Sally Young, Mike Smith, John Hart, Ian McAlister, John Warhurst, Wayne Errington, Peter van Onselen  and Jennifer Rayner, just to name a few!
One of the reasons for this blog is the same as that original attempt at a thesis. To create a repository of collected thoughts, experiences and references for my own information and to share with like-minded individuals. Someone also pointed out to me recently (and I suspect it to be true) that more people will eventually read the blog than ever read the thesis anyway! Also this blog will prove one of the universal truths about campaigning, recently paraphrased by our PM: “No single person is the suppository of all wisdom”.
This blog also will (over several years probably đ
1. Share lots of stories, jokes and interesting info about campaigning in Australia and New Zealand
2. Question some myths about US-style campaigning in Australia. Australian campaigning news still dominated by US-based media (I’m just as guilty as the next political geek of over-sharing news about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton)
3. Smash some misinformation shared in the MSM about campaigning in Australia (mostly by sharing wisdom and sage analysis from some of the writers listed above and others).
4. try and bridge the chasm that often separates political scientists and political practitioners, mainly by sharing some of the political wisdom and analysis that is regularly done within academia but doesn’t get much coverage outside of academia.
5. Help me keep numerous links , clippings and references to lots of existing, interesting blogs and media articles that deserve to be congregated in one place for easy future reference. Again, this may take years so please be patient if you read this within the next six months and wonder wtf?! đ
6. Share my recently discovered joys and benefits of blogging!
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