B21 - The Political Role of the Private Sector
Date: Jun 4 | Time: 03:15pm to 04:45pm | Location:
Microtargeting & the Bidirectional Flow of Influence: Simon Vodrey (Carleton University)
Abstract: Political marketing entails that marketing has infiltrated virtually all aspects of politics — be it fundraising, campaigning, or governing (Giasson, Lees-Marshment, & Marland, 2012; Lees-Marshment, 2009; Lees-Marshment, Conley & Cosgrove, 2014). While this pattern of influence has dominated the literature, some have recently suggested that the pattern of influence between politics and marketing may well be in the process of evolving. Building on the works of Sasha Issenberg (2012), Clive Veroni (2014), Daniel Kreiss (2016) and Bruce I. Newman (2016), I examine whether commercial marketers may also be learning from political practitioners and, more specifically, from political marketers. Essentially, I analyze the extent to which the flow of influence and innovation between commercial and political marketers is bidirectional and operating as a feedback loop rather than merely being a unidirectional flow from commercial to political marketers as is commonly assumed. The example I use to investigate this subject matter is that of microtargeting. My analysis proceeds in the following manner: First, I set the stage by establishing the background on the practice of microtargeting. Second, relying upon the results from thirty-three in-depth elite interviews with political marketers, market researchers, political researchers, pollsters and commercial marketers from Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, I examine how the practice of technology-enabled microtargeting can be viewed as indicative of a two-way street with bidirectional interplay between commercial marketers and political marketers rather than as a one-way street with one-way traffic from commercial to political marketers.
Corporate Long-Game: Using the "Playbook" to Shape Public Policy Paradigms:: Tracey Wagner-Rizvi (University of Waterloo)
Abstract: It has been observed that corporations and their business associations draw on a common “playbook” of strategies and tactics to influence substantive policy at all levels of governance to their advantage. Less examined are the private sector’s efforts to shape the paradigms that determine which policies are pursued both globally and nationally and what role private actors are able to play in developing them. These paradigms have implications for governance and policy-making in the public interest. This paper takes the examples of the baby food and soda industries and describes their tactics to encourage paradigms of individual responsibility and choice, corporate social responsibility, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. They do this by influencing the framing of debates, influencing the evidence, co-opting through funding and partnerships, and boosting their images as responsible corporate citizens. These paradigms create an environment conducive to companies and their associations arguing against regulation and in favour of voluntary measures and representing themselves as legitimate partners in developing health-related policy. The result can be policy-making processes and mechanisms that are vulnerable to conflicts of interest, and policies that fail to protect health in the public interest.
Non-State Welfare Provision, Co-Optation and the Containment of the Nonprofit Sector in China: Philippe Martin (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: China has adopted since the early 2010s a new welfare approach, whereby local governments increasingly contract out the provision of a wide range of public services to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although the delegation of service provision to non-state actors is common across the world, China’s state-led pluralization of the welfare mix represents a puzzling phenomenon at the intersection of its evolving welfare regime, civil society, and authoritarian consolidation. This paper argues that the delegation of service provision by the Chinese government to NGOs aims not only at increasing the supply of social welfare at the local level, but also at containing the political pluralization potential of the third sector (civil society). This paper examines mechanisms of co-optation and containment at play in this new phase of government-NGO relations in China and shows how they shape the interests and identity of NGOs, steering them towards areas of work that authorities encourage or tolerate and away from sensitive themes and activities. In connecting the emergence of China’s new welfare approach to the larger process of authoritarian power consolidation, this paper heeds recent calls to investigate social policy and the concrete governing processes at play in authoritarian regimes. This paper is based on fieldwork research conducted in 2017 in Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. I met with representatives (leaders and senior managers) of almost twenty organizations involved in the provision of social welfare and public services, including NGOs, intermediaries such as nonprofit incubators, as well as with subject-matter experts and academics.