Political Advertising in the Crossroad of Political Pragmatism and Political Ideology

What is it about?

The study of political advertising so far is a typical example of a great conflict in the study of political communication nowadays: the conflict between the politics of pragmatism and the politics of ideology. This article comes to propose that the study of political advertising can contribute to reconciling these two different areas of concern, insofar as we pay distinctive attention to the role of discourse in political communication; not as a derivative of electoral design, what the legacy of modernization has taught us, but as the primary locus where all strategies of political communication are meaningfully articulated. It is not, however, an articulation on the basis of political philosophy (ideology in liberal political theory) or with respect to the reproduction of the social order (ideology in critical cultural studies) that grasp the ideological potential of contemporary, aestheticized and managerialized, political communication. It is rather, as this article argues, drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory, the recontextualization of symbolisms from the past, interwoven with the precarious institutional interests and asymmetries of the present, which lies at the heart of the ideological potential of political advertising. It is, therefore, a discourse-based analytics of political advertisements that we need so as to grasp the conditions of possibility for this potential.

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Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash