The Human Resource Management of Political Staffers:Insights from Prime Ministers' Advisers and Reformers

The Human Resource Management of Political Staffers: Insights from Prime Ministers' Advisers and Reformers explores the human resource management of political staffers and advisers who work for politicians. Deeply grounded in the experiences of those who worked in the highest political offices under Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, Scott Morrison and Jacinda Ardern, it makes the case for better management of staffers by illuminating past problems with the workplace such as extreme workloads, little work-life balance and lack of orientation and training. But it also offers a way forward by combining ad hoc positive experiences into guidance for future best practice. Drawing on interviews with advisers/staffers and practitioners working on HR reform in politics, in four countries - the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - it provides a research-informed best practice guide for the staffers/advisers, their managers and reformers which offers practical advice on how to recruit, orientate and train, manage and support staffers and advisers appropriately within the complex political environment. It also conveys the highly skilled roles staffers undertake and the democratic contribution they make. The Human Resource Management of Political Staffers is a must-have guide to current and future advisers, politicians and ministers. Human resource management for political staffers is important not just for the individuals but to enable taxpayer-funded staffers to perform more effectively, which will in turn help elected politicians deliver for voters.</p

Being more with less: Exploring the flexible political leadership identities of government ministers

The paper focuses on the identity work of government ministers, exploring how they experience themselves in relation to contemporary demands and discourses of leadership and democracy. We note a substantial number of studies seeking to develop theories of political and public leadership, particularly in more collaborative directions, but no studies that seek to explore how such demands are experienced by the political leaders who occupy leadership roles. We adopt a poststructuralist approach to identity as a means of empirically exploring how government ministers construct their identities. Drawing on 51 interviews with senior politicians, we propose a model of flexible political leadership identity, which argues that just as public agencies in these austere times are asked to do more with less, so political leaders seem to need to be more but with less perceived discretionary power. We propose four identities that answer quite different leadership demands: ‘the consultor’, ‘the traveller,’ ‘the adjudicator’ and ‘the master.’ These are semi-occupied identities, partial fulfilments of contemporary but contradictory leadership discourses. We conclude the paper with a reflection on how our findings might inform future research and leadership development interventions

Political marketing as party management - Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997

Political Marketing has attracted increasing attention from political commentators in recent years, yet relatively little academic work has been conducted into its nature - either theoretically or empirically. That which does exist have focused on the use of marketing in campaigning, which although important, limits discussion to just one aspect of a party’s behaviour where marketing can have an influence. Marketing as used by businesses is not just about the slogans or catch-phrases used to sell the product. It is used to inform the design of that product. Transferred to parties, marketing can be used in deciding what policies to adopt and what organisational structures to employ. More importantly, it has been used by British parties, most recently by New Labour in the lead up to the 1997 election, but also informed the behaviour of the Conservative Party as far back as 1979. This wider utilisation of marketing has affected many aspects of the parties behaviour, including leadership powers, membership rights, constitution and policies - not just their campaigning activities. This has much wider ramifications, suggesting a new role for political parties, with normative implications for politics as a whole. This paper will thus explore the potential of political marketing and its use by Thatcher in 1979 and Blair in 1997 in order to enable consideration of these implications

Giving voters what they want? Party orientation perceptions and preferences in the British electorate

Some of the most important propositions in the political marketing literature hinge on assumptions about the electorate. In particular, voters are presumed to react in different ways to different orientations or postures. Yet there are theoretical reasons for questioning some of these assumptions, and certainly they have seldom been empirically tested. Here, we focus on one prominent example of political marketing research: Lees-Marshment’s orientations’ model. We investigate how the public reacts to product and market orientation, whether they see a trade-off between the two (a point in dispute among political marketing scholars), and whether partisans differ from non-partisan voters by being more inclined to value product over market orientation. Evidence from two mass sample surveys of the British public (both conducted online by YouGov) demonstrates important heterogeneity within the electorate, casts doubt on the core assumptions underlying some political marketing arguments and raises broader questions about what voters are looking for in a party

Is the personal always political? Education and political knowledge strengthen the relationship between openness and conservatism

Abstract. Research demonstrates that the negative relationship between Openness to Experience and conservatism is heightened among the informed. We extend this literature using national survey data (Study 1; N = 13,203) and data from students (Study 2; N = 311). As predicted, education – a correlate of political sophistication – strengthened the negative relationship between Openness and conservatism (Study 1). Study 2 employed a knowledge-based measure of political sophistication to show that the Openness × Political Sophistication interaction was restricted to the Openness aspect of Openness. These studies demonstrate that knowledge helps people align their ideology with their personality, but that the Openness × Political Sophistication interaction is specific to one aspect of Openness – nuances that are overlooked in the literature. </jats:p

Political social media marketing:a systematic literature review and agenda for future research

We focus on political marketing and conduct a systematic literature review of journal articles exploring political marketing on social media. The systematic literature review delineates the current state of political social media marketing literature. It spans six databases and comprises sixty-six journal articles published between 2011 and 2020. We identify and categorize the variables studied in the literature and develop an integrative framework that links these variables. We describe the research themes that exist in the literature. The review demonstrates that the field is growing. However, the literature is fragmented, along with being predominantly based in the US context. Conceptual and theoretical shortcomings also exist. Moreover, the literature ignores pertinent contemporary topics such as co-creation, influencer marketing, and political advertising on social media. Nevertheless, a nascent domain with growing practical significance, political social media marketing provides various exciting avenues for further research, which we outline in this study.</p

Political Communication

The term "strategic communication" traditionally has been understood as referring to external corporate communication, such as public relations, marketing communication, and advertising, with insufficient consideration beyond its role as a tool of persuasive influence. In recent years, however, the field of strategic communication has evolved to be more holistic in its approach and its role within sociocultural contexts. Articles, textbooks, and handbooks have attempted to define the scope, purpose, and nature of the concept, but as the first major comprehensive work of its kind, The International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication captures the full scope of contemporary theory and practice in strategic communication.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Toward a conceptual framework of emotional relationship marketing: an examination of two UK political parties

The purpose of this paper is to review the notion of branding and evaluate its applicability to political parties. As ideological politics is in decline, branding may provide a consistent narrative where voters feel a sense of warmth and belonging. The paper aims to build an understanding of the complexity of building a political brand where a combination of image, logo, leadership, and values can all contribute to a compelling brand narrative. It investigates how competing positive and negative messages attempt to build and distort the brand identity. A critical review of bran ding, relationship marketing, and political science literature articulates the conceptual development of branding and its applicability to political parties. The success or failure of negative campaigning is due to the authenticity of a political party’s brand values — creating a coherent brand story — if there is no distance between the brand values articulated by the political party and the values their community perceives then this creates an "authentic" brand. However, if there is a gap this paper illustrates how negative campaigning can be used to build a "doppelganger brand," which undermines the credibility of the authentic political brand. The paper argues that political parties need to understand how brand stories are developed but also how they can be used to protect against negative advertising. This has implications for political marketing strategists and political parties. This paper draws together branding theory and relationship marketing and incorporates them into a framework that makes a contribution to the political marketing literature

Local political marketing in the context of the conservative party

Local political marketing can be defined as marketing related strategy, activities, and tactics implemented by a political party in a local geographic constituency, in order to attempt to maximise aggregate potential voter satisfaction, and therefore maximise total number of votes and electoral support in the constituency. Through 12 in-depth interviews with Local Constituency Party representatives from the Conservative Party, the study found that local political marketing was acknowledged by a majority of respondents although this was not unequivocal, and was frequently conflated with campaigning. Local political marketing was associated with: visual identity, language/messages, values, image, communication devices, awareness raising, data management and targeting, and simplification. The support from higher levels of the party in local political marketing was varied across constituencies. There was evidence of growing coordination /influence by higher levels of the party in local political marketing. However, this tended to be in seats judged as ‘winnable’