Abstract
Since political marketing is largely an American invention we must look to American history for explanations of the growth of the genre; for many themes touch the American political psyche and political marketing is sometimes their expression. Both early and recent American historical experience define the political culture and values from which contemporary political marketing draws its subject matter.
‘The colony approximated more and more the novel spectacle of a community homogeneous in all its parts. A democracy, more perfect than antiquity had dared to dream of, started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society.’
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
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Notes and References
Nevins, Alan and Commager, Henry Steele, A Pocket History of the United States (New York: Pocket Books, 1976).
McKay, David, American Politics and Society (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983).
De Tocqueville’s insights into the early nineteenth-century American character are still pertinent. See de Tocqueville, Thomas, Democracy in America, Trans. Henry Reeve (Washington Square Press, 1964).
For an account of the operation of machine politics, see Burnham, Walter Dean, The Current Crisis in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 143.
For discussions of the ‘new right’ and its political packaging see Crawford, Alan (Thunder on the Right, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
Also see Saloma, John S., Ominous Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984).
For an account of direct mail and the ‘new right’ see Sabato, Larry, The Rise of Political Consultants: New Ways of Winning Elections (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
For an account of how Americans shunned a negative, pessimistic credo, see Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1964 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965) ch. 11.
For information on the decline in party loyalty, see Crotty, William J. and Jacobson, Gary C., American Parties in Decline (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1980).
For Kennedy’s consciousness of the role of image see Hodgson, Godfrey, All Things To All Men (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984) p. 174.
Blumenthal, Sidney, The Permanent Campaign (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
Crotty, William J. and Jacobson, Gary C., American Parties in Decline (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1980).
Crawford, Alan, Thunder on the Right (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
Further Reading
Denenberg, R.V., Understanding American Politics (London: Fontana Books, 1984).
Nicholas, H.G., The Nature of American Politics (Oxford University Press, 1980).
Vile, M.S.C., Politics in the U.S.A. (London: Hutchinson, 1982).
Graber, Doris A., Mass Media and American Politics (Congressional Quarterly Press, Washington, 1984) p. 180.
Hodgson, Godfrey, All things to all men (Penguin Books, 1984) Chapter Five.
Polsby and Wildavsky, Presidential Elections, p. 159 (Charles Scribner’s Sons New York, 1976).
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© 1990 Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy
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O’Shaughnessy, N.J. (1990). Only in America. In: The Phenomenon of Political Marketing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10352-2_3
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