Abstract

Political marketing can help governments and political parties to respond to the specific needs of the citizens and avoid superficial or undifferentiated protest, but rather than just conducting market research, another form of consultation or dialogue is through a deliberative political marketing process. The intelligent involvement of citizens in political decision-making processes can also increase the effectiveness of governance. The multifaceted knowledge of citizens is an additional resource that should be utilized. This idea is based on the concept of communicative action (Habermas 1984) respondent deliberative democracy (Habermas 1996: 287–328) and rests upon the argument that through the participation of the public and the citizens in political processes, it becomes possible to make better decisions and thus also to communicate them more easily. Not only from a philosophical standpoint, but also directly from practice-oriented administrative science there have been efforts to increase citizen participation in administrative politics and decision-making at least since the discussions of New Public Management and Good Governance (Scott 2003: 55–69). After all, what is striven for is an increasingly efficient constitutional and citizen-friendly administrative practice and that is dependent upon democratic quality and legitimacy (Dahl 1994). From the viewpoint of political marketing, deliberative communicative processes represent new forms of dialogue and marketing. Furthermore, deliberative political marketing can develop beyond a technique to a form of governance.