Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

by Susan Delacourt
Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

by Susan Delacourt

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Overview

This second edition offers an insightful and provocative look at the inside world of political marketing in Canada—and what this means about the state of our democracy in the twenty-first century—from a leading political commentator.

Inside the political backrooms of Ottawa, the Mad Men of Canadian politics are planning their next consumer friendly pitch. Where once politics was seen as a public service, increasingly it’s seen as a business, and citizens are the customers. But its unadvertised products are voter apathy and gutless public policy. Susan Delacourt takes readers into the world of Canada’s top political marketers, from the 1950s to the present, explaining how parties slice and dice their platforms for different audiences and how they manage the media. The current system divides the country into “niche” markets and abandons the hard political work of knitting together broad consensus or national vision. Little wonder then, that most Canadians have checked out of the political process: less than two per cent of the population belongs to a political party and fewer than half of voters under the age of thirty showed up at the ballot box in the last few federal elections. Provocative, incisive, entertaining and refreshingly non-partisan, Shopping for Votes offers a new narrative for understanding political culture in Canada.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781771621106
Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Publication date: 05/07/2016
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 599,885
File size: 759 KB

About the Author

Susan Delacourt is a political columnist in Ottawa who writes for the Toronto Star and Ipolitics, and appears weekly on CBC and CTV. Her work, which includes three previous books on politics, has earned her the Hy Solomon Award in 2014 for excellence in public policy journalism and the 2011 Charles Lynch award for career-long coverage of politics. Shopping for Votes was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, and the John W. Dafoe Book Prize. Delacourt lives in Ottawa, ON, where teaches political journalism and communication at Carleton University.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Introduction Tim Hoctons Voters 9

The Pitch

1 Let's Get Canada Shopping 21

2 Sold Like Soap 41

3 Scientific Shopping 73

The Bargaining

4 Market-Tested 103

5 The Brand-Wagon 142

6 And Now, a Word from Our Sponsors 175

Sealing the Deal

7 Market Leader 197

8 Retail Rules 222

9 Sliced and Diced 255

10 This Little Party Went to Market 286

11 Checking Out 317

Acknowledgements 329

Notes, Links and Further Reading 332

Index 344

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