The technologies I have outlined were undoubtedly born in the USA but they
are now diffusing to all democracies at greater or lesser speeds, following the
increasingly insistent media logic. The case of Italy is the most extreme. There,
Silvio Berlusconi was able to turn a potent mixture of marketing and celebrity into
a politics. Stille is worth quoting at length on Berlusconi as a model of where a
mediatized and heavily affective politics could go in extremis: often described as
more American than America, Berlusconi built his political career on importing
American political techniques – from focus groups to targeted polling – and then
accentuating them.
[In 199 4 ] Berlusconi undertook what has to be one of the most extraordinarily
innovative election campaigns of our age. All the divisions of Berlusconi’s vast
empire – from television stations and newspapers to department stores and
an insurance and financial services company – were fused almost overnight
into an enormous political machine. The ad executives contacted the
companies that bought advertising on the Berlusconi channels. The stock-
brokers and insurance agents working for Berlusconi’s financial services
company became campaign workers and set about turning the hundreds
of thousands, possibly millions, of financial clients into voters and party
supporters. The candidates took screen tests at the television studios, were
given lessons in politics, and were cross-examined to see how they would hold
up under the fire of an election campaign. The candidates all were obliged to
buy a special kit that included a thirty-five page booklet and eleven videotapes
explaining the party’s program as well as lessons on how to speak in public
and on TV. The company’s media experts, with expertise in testing TV
programs, conducted focus groups to hone Berlusconi’s message to appeal to
the largest possible audience. The party/company set up pay-per-call phone
numbers...that allowed people to listen to the latest comments of
Berlusconi, and earned money for the movement at the same time.
(Stille 2006: 1–2)But the case of the UK is also instructive. Since about 1992, something like a
permanent campaign has been in operation there, the result of its adoption from
US sources by New Labour. Whilst it does not run at quite the intensity of its
North American counterpart, the result of a slightly longer electoral cycle, still
nearly all of the techniques found in the US permanent campaign have gradually
made their way across the Atlantic (Norris et al. 1999), fuelled by the hiring of
US-based consultants at various times.^45 For example, all the main parties now use
regular opinion polls and volume direct marketing techniques, including customer
relations management software, which calls on the large commercial lifestyle
databases that are now available. According to Webber (2005: 4 ), there is common
agreement amongst the main political parties that ‘the skills needed to operate a
campaign were becoming closer to those needed to operate effectively in the
commercial sector’. So, all the parties use geodemographic systems, especially to
cluster constituencies and to tailor campaigns and to choose the kinds of candidates
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