A Political Campaign Gone Wrong
Politics, the active discussion and implementation of power and governance, has been around for a long time. Naturally, the art of politics has evolved over decades. In most democratic societies today, politicians need to communicate with their voters in order to ‘sell’ them an agenda typically filled with promises of improvement. This type of communication between these two parties is defined as political communication. Simply put, political communication is the interaction between political actors such as politicians, political parties or political organizations, and the public. Political actors send messages to the public through various different mediums such as radio, TV, magazines and newspapers. In today’s world of technology, a new and vast platform of communication that is also used by political actors is social media. Political actors often use social media in order to discuss certain topics or connect with their voters. According to McNair, political communication originated from Business when the world of advertisement and marketing started influencing political direction. However, this influence does not always lead to positive outcomes. In the hopes of attracting voters, many political campaigns have instead achieved the complete opposite after
One example of a political campaign advertisement video gone wrong is that of the Free Patriotic Movement party, where the advertisement said ‘sois belle et vote’. This French phrase, which translates to ‘be beautiful and vote’, is playing on the words of a well known sexist French phrase that translates to ‘be beautiful and shut up’ (sois belle et tais toi). Although the FPM party was looking towards attracting the voices of more women in the voting process, their campaign advertisement received backlash. Many saw the advertisement to be very sexist and disrespectful to women.
Political communication may impact our lives and decisions in more ways than we might realize. All our votes and allegiances to political actors are extremely influential in the world of democracy. For that reason, it must be important for citizens to be educated on political communication.
