From disenchantment to re-engagement? Citizen-consumers and political brands

This paper seeks to address the problem of increased voter abstention from the electoral process in the UK by considering the concept of citizen-consumer relationships with political brands. It focuses initially on negative... [ view full abstract ]

This paper seeks to address the problem of increased voter abstention from the electoral process in the UK by considering the concept of citizen-consumer relationships with political brands.
It focuses initially on negative advertising as one possible causative factor with respect to this sense of alienation on the part of non-voters, and then applies concepts from the consumer culture literature in order to explore the possibility that citizen-consumers, accustomed to using brands as resources for expression of the self-concept (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998), find the brand choices proffered them by political marketers unusable for this purpose. The paper proposes three possible reasons for this, first, that political brands may be perceived as lacking consistency of meaning and so may not be seen as reliable identity anchors, second, that practices of attack-advertising render them unattractive as a means to express or portray the self-concept (to oneself or others) and third, that centrist political brands in particular may be perceived as inadequately differentiated from one another and thus lack the capacity to differentiate the self. As all these possibilities have yet to be addressed empirically, the paper concludes by outlining areas for development of research questions in order to progress the research.