Budapest Political Communication Forum

The special issue is based on papers presented at the international political communication and marketing conference, “Budapest Political Communication Forum”, held at the Budapest Metropolitan University (formerly the Budapest College of Communication and Business) on July 26, 2013. The Organizing Committee invited both social science and humanities perspectives on specific regions, among them Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, Ukraine. Cross-disciplinary approach to the analyzed topics was encouraged. Several topics were announced, like political campaigns in national elections; the impact of global crisis on the electoral process; voter and citizen behavior in national, transnational, and cross-cultural contexts; the new social media as an electoral factor; the professionalism of the political campaigns in Europe.

The contributors included academic professors, media experts, political consultants, political marketing practitioners from Central and Eastern Europe, Sweden, and the United States. In their papers, they examined their country-specific marketing and electoral strategies, the characteristics of Eastern European political discourse, and also the correlation between political network and election campaign.

The common ground for the authors is mainly the model of voter behavior elaborated by Bruce Newman (1999). He states: “The fundamental axiom of the model is that voters are consumers of a service offered by a politician, and similar to consumers in the commercial marketplace, voters choose candidates based on the perceived value they offer them. The model proposes that there are five distinct and separate cognitive domains that drive voters’ behavior. A key proposition of the model is that voter behavior can be driven by a combination of one or more of the domains in a given election. The model consists of the following components” (political issues, social imagery, candidate personality, situational contingency, epistemic value) (Newman, 1999, p. 260–262).

The assembled four articles for publication in the special issue of the journal mainly describe crucial issues of national elections and electoral campaigns. One of the four articles refers to political marketing that might act for breaking the trust in democratic societies, the further articles share opinion about the concept of information warfare with the modern means of mass communication, about crisis management as a governmental strategy, and about the role of NGOs in public diplomacy.

In “The Narrative of ‘Information Warfare against Russia’ in Russian Academic discourse”, Ieva Berzina (National Defence Academy of Latvia, Latvia) treats the concept of “information warfare” that is based on the idea that one country can pursue its national interests in another by influencing emotional and cognitive dimensions of the other people and decision makers of the respective country with the modern means of mass communication. The research question of the paper: what are the main themes used by Russian scientists in constructing the narrative “information warfare against Russia?” To answer this question, the author analyzed the content of written texts and public presentations of the Russian scientists on the problem of information warfare. She came to the preliminary conclusion that the academic narrative about “information warfare against Russia” used diverse themes including the breakdown of USSR as a result of information warfare of the West against the Soviet Union.

“The Political Marketing of Broken Trust” by Cristian Andrei (Romanian Political Marketing Association, Romania) examines political marketing as a practice and as a political mind-set that exists in a social and political environment of broken trust. The paper investigates participation, election, and polling results as indicators and outputs of both political trust and political marketing processes. The author used as a starting point the experiences gained during 23 years of post-1989 Romanian democracy. During that period, the winning parties and coalitions often collapsed or got into scandals after the elections. The author sets the goal to explore the meaning of these tendencies and their impact on the political trust. He also intends to answer the question if these phenomena are a denial of a consumer-oriented political marketing approach.

“Role of Russian NGOs in New Public Diplomacy” by Greg Simons (Uppsala University, Finland) examines New Public Diplomacy related to the Russian state that has primary problems in communication with global publics due to its negative reputation. One possible way around the problem is to try and use NGOs to spread the message. Several questions are addressed in the paper relating to this new trend. In terms of organizational and personnel structure, how are the NGOs being arranged? How do the NGOs go about marketing themselves and their message? What is their message? The author concludes his paper saying the NGOs provide a useful platform for advocacy, as they possess the means for publishing, distributing materials, and organizing public events. These means help them to communicate a strategic message and to influence publics in our global environment.

In “Crisis Management: Government Strategy in Framing Reform Proposals and Communications” Wojciech Cwalina and Andrzej Falkowski (Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland) integrate the psychological and political marketing approach to measuring voters’ behavior. They used a multidimensional scaling method to evaluate voters’ attitude to seven unpopular reforms the Polish government planned to introduce in 2011 to prevent the effects of economic crisis. The applied method was used to position the reforms for three groups of voters: supporters of the governing parties, supporters of the opposition parties, and independent voters. The data were interpreted in the context of the rule of mental accounting and also in the context of framing. The results showed that support for each reform had a different predictors’ structure of communication.