At election time, very few campaigns use the tools and techniques that help lead a candidate to success. The administration is the answer to articulate all the components of the electoral process and the organization of the political parties. Although the political parties have different purposes from the commercial companies, they are, in many aspects, in a similar situation, since to achieve their objectives they must sell, if not products, if at least ideas, programs, people, images, etc. to a certain audience.
In countries of the world where the democratic system prevails, the way to gain power is produced by popular election and those who participate in electoral contests must use everything necessary to promote their candidates, parties and programs so that the voters have reason to lavish popular favor on them. The means and resources of all kinds that can be appropriated for this purpose, based on diagnoses, analysis of the social and historical situation, can be grouped into a new discipline, which is called the Political and Electoral Administration.
Political and electoral administrators learn the theoretical - practical bases to work with professionalism in the construction of political and social consensus for the sake of power. An electoral campaign manager, can work in the strategic management of different campaigns, advise the image and management of the chosen candidate, be at the forefront of the administrative management of a political party, be a consultant for organizations of a social nature and survey manager and interpreter elections for the formulation of strategies.
Political and Electoral Administrators Needed
A change in the democratic model has taken place in the sense that it was participated exclusively by bureaucratic loot, but with the progressive dismantling of patronage, a new model based on democracy by interest groups is now configured. Interest groups are private sector agents who engage in electoral confrontation, closely related to the ex-officio political class, to reap the benefits of juicy hiring or profitable legislation. In Colombia, the large economic conglomerates of the tobacco industry, beer, soft drinks, pension funds and the financial sector have obtained monumental profits from this concept.
Politics is gaining more and more strength, signs of a highly profitable business for the private sector. The linking of companies to the political game with large sums, is subject to a high investment risk, facing the lack of references in the handling of variables so little known, the use of new logics derived from various fields of knowledge and the uncertainty against a predictable result of the campaign. On the other hand, with reference to the parties, it is frequently observed that the election of candidates within a community does not take into account the technical arguments of the electoral market and their programs are usually at best, given that they exist, a patchwork quilt of proposals, unrelated and far from the real priorities of the population.
Today people have less and less time to learn about the economic, political and social reality of the country, even more to know in detail what is the proposal or program of the candidates who are in the race and end up delegating to the media. the election decision, which based on surveys paid by the parties, recommend to your favorites. The masses have been progressively excluded from reality due to the lack of physical and psychological time, causing an ethical crisis in political culture and a progressive loss of citizen participation in public decision-making, basic conditions for construction of social fabric.
In our country there is not only disinformation, but the vices that generally have framed the campaigns throughout Latin America appear. The semantic confusions, novel terminology, methodological misplacement and even quackery have made their appearance, causing great disorientation in the election process, thus reducing to publicity or simple political propaganda the complex reality of an electoral company.
In addition to the above, we find a good number of ideologically non-existent candidates, without proposals, without speech, in a primitive, folkloric and frivolous nebula, with high exposure to cameras and susceptible to the intrigues of their own work team, without analysis of the contents of the context, without discussion on the strategies, the method and dispersed in the fulfillment of a narrow agenda.
Millions of dollars are lost in headless campaigns, articulated around the interests of a bureaucracy impervious to the demands of the majority or organized by an empirical clientele with its back to the minimum requirements of planning, directing, organizing and controlling. Part of the crisis of the parties is due to the fact that they are managed by old family castes entrenched in the gnomonic parties, who disregard at all costs the technical opinions of the investigation and a basic administrative structure.
The Political and Electoral Administration, supported in seeking that a campaign responds to the demand of social, economic, cultural and political needs and interests of a specific community. The needs of the people are the basic input to create an ideological program that solves those needs and inspires the offer of a candidate who embodies this program, to be supported and promoted through political publicity.
The investigation of the political market would be prior to any other electoral action, the profile of the appropriate leader or candidate for each electoral segment, the political program, and the most appropriate advertising medium should emerge. A basic fact in politics is that no party, no candidate will be able to win, if their ideology, if what they offer, goes against the current of what the electoral market thinks and wants. Hence, every politician should use the resources of the administration not only to endorse the basic ideas that his market indicates, but to successfully manage the components of the administrative process in order to obtain power.
As democratic participation expands, we observe the birth of new parties and the strengthening of existing ones, the configuration of an increasingly powerful competition and the contribution of the State in campaign financing, shows the need to resort to tools that come from the Administration itself.
Foundation of the Political and Electoral Administration.
In approaching the subject of this new career, we must begin by saying that it is a way of thinking, a management philosophy that encompasses each and every one of the areas and activities of an organization, in such a way that by adopting this conception it affects, not Only Marketing activities, but all the efforts of the organization.
In order to understand the above, and given that Marketing is the essence of the new discipline, it is necessary to comment on some of the definitions about what authors understand by Marketing and observe how they present a great diversity of criteria around he. This situation demonstrates, once again in a reliable way, how this nascent discipline is currently in times of structuring, foundation and development.
Arthur Felton defines Marketing as “a state of mind of companies that insists on the integration and coordination of all Marketing functions, functions that in turn are harmonized with the other functions of the company, in order to achieve the basic objective to produce maximum profits in the long term ”.
Philip Kotler, the father of Marketing, in his works "Marketing" and "Marketing Management", establishes the theoretical bases of modern Marketing. In his first text he defines it as the “Development of activities in the field of business that direct the flow of products and services from the producer to the consumer or users”. In this case, you just limit it to the distribution function. He then defines it as "Human activity aimed at satisfying needs and wants through a process of exchange." However, in his latest work, he further expands his field of action for which he proposes the following definition: "It is the set of human activities, aimed at facilitating and conducting exchanges"
After presenting a fleeting vision about the definitions and finding one that covers the political aspect, the way is opened to venture into the fields of the Political and Electoral Administration.
Within the different Marketing classes we find organizations, people and places, where our object of study would be framed. The four most common types of People Marketing are Political Candidate Marketing, Celebrity Marketing, Merit Marketing, including in this the efforts developed by people to make known and persuade others that they possess the best qualifications for a particular position or job. Place Marketing is basically Home Marketing, Real Estate Investment, Travel and Nations Marketing.
A last category refers to Marketing for social causes, which is based on a balance between the profits of companies, the satisfaction of the wishes of consumers and the well-being of the community. This important and new type of Marketing includes the activities developed to create, preserve and modify attitudes and behavior towards an idea or cause, regardless of the organization or person that sponsors it.
The Political and Electoral Administration participates both in the Marketing of people (candidates) and in the Marketing of social causes, within which political parties are included. The latter aim, even when the real motivations of their leaders are not always altruistic, "to make their ideas, their projects, or their candidates succeed, with a view to improving and transforming society."
It was not long before political parties discovered with unusual interest what Marketing methods could offer to help them better understand and influence voters, in addition to systematically detecting the needs and aspirations of those they seek to serve.
In addition to the concept of Marketing, it is important to approach that of political parties in order to understand the object of the Political Administration. Political parties are defined by Robert Michels as a fighting organization in the political sense of the term and he proposes that, as such, they must adapt to the laws of tactics.
La Palombara and Weiner, in a functionalist characterization, affirm that in any type of political society a party seems to perform certain common functions; first, "he is expected to organize public opinion and communicate demands to the center of government power and decision": second, "he must articulate for his followers the concept and meaning of the general community"; Third, the party “will be intimately involved in the political recruitment and selection of the political leadership in whose hands the powers and decision will reside to a large extent.
Coleman and Rosberg defines them as “formally organized associations, with the explicit and stated purpose of acquiring and / or maintaining full control of the property alone, or in coalition or electoral competition with other similar associations, over the personnel and policy of the government of an alleged Sovereign State ”
Another, much broader definition treats them as "any organization that nominates candidates for election to a parliament."
A final aspect, related to political parties, within the systematic approach developed in this article, is the one that classifies them as “a subgroup of the system, with its own power generation mechanisms”.
A more rigorous definition is presented by Humberto Uribe in the book "The Colombian Political Parties", inspired by Burdeau and Aron, assures that a political party is a stable and durable organization with a certain number of individuals who identify with the same label, who profess the same political ideals and strive to make them prevail by incorporating as many citizens as possible and fighting for the conquest and exercise of power.
To this part, it is clear that the Political and electoral Administration is provided with the marketing techniques to bring a party to power. The product to be sold is the candidate, the party and the program that must respond to the attitudes and expectations of the interested population and that will be launched with the aim of obtaining maximum suffrage. At this point it is necessary to mention customer relationships or customer market, where there is exchange but unequal and in a non-competitive situation.
On the other hand, the proposal on financing of the electoral campaigns by the State, would force the political parties to look for techniques and procedures not only to know their constituents, but to try to influence them and the Political Administration facilitates the work of political organizations. However, there is no lack of those who see in the Political Administration an attack against democracy, as a subtle mechanism of manipulation of the electorate.
Conclusions
The struggle of the parties for the seizure of power and the linking of other sectors to the political game with large sums, make the conquest of the state a great company, in which the tactics and strategies of the world of commerce would be applied, to guarantee rational management of resources and a more or less predictable result of campaigns.
It is possible to consider the candidate, his program and party as a political product and that the potential electorate is the political market, capable of being investigated, influenced and mobilized to obtain popular favor at the ballot box. It is clear that the tied or captive votes of the clientelist system are not the object of the politing market.
The action of voting is developed around a series of influences of a psychological, sociological, genetic, moral, affective, rational, environmental order, which makes it necessary to involve the behavioral sciences, the organizational and political sciences, such as marketing, support of the Political and Electoral Administration, to be able to control, manage and project from the State, no less than the course and the public and private destiny of millions of people, within the framework of ethics.
Unlike the commercial company, in the political company the closing of the sale is carried out in a single day, the day of the elections and is based not only on the administrative discourse, but on a certain ideology and political thought. The exercise of this discipline requires a high level of managerial talent, since the changes in public opinion are too fickle, the plans that are developed are emergent, there are no technical manuals to correct the uncertainty of the parties, the candidate is the instead a political product, ammunition from the electoral battery and supreme leader of the debate. In business management and campaign management the same principles, objectives and functions are established, but the end is different and the methodology to achieve it more complex.
Human talent is the basis of managerial action, both in business organization and in politics; but unlike companies, politing carries out its mission with a large part of volunteer personnel, an advantage that implies from political management, a special willingness to organize group motivation, democratic participation, apply a system of rewards and comprehensive training, thereby achieving a close relationship with the organizational culture so proclaimed from administrative theory.
The future trend is not to hire campaign consultancies only at electoral times, but rather to implement administrative and political marketing tasks within the parties, continuously and permanently, achieving greater legitimacy in the profile of the administrative and technical management of the parties.
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