Spain and the US: Differences in the Electoral Campaigns

The topic I’m going to talk about in this blog is the differences there are in the approach to voters on the electoral campaigns in Spain and the US. The two last chapters of the movie The Persuaders talked about how marketing influences the campaigns and that facet made me think about how different it is in Spain so I decided to make some research in the topic.

The first point we must have in mind is that in Spain people where more concern about how was the last American Campaign going since the economical situation we are living in the last times. There where a lot of expectations about it and I remembered an article about Pablo Pardo, a Spanish journalist of El Mundo (one of the most redden newspapers in Spain) who talked about why USA electoral campaigns are so spectacular comparing with Spain. Well, the answer is triple:

·      In the US politicians have to convince people to register in the electoral register and vote, while in Spain voters only have to go the day of the elections and vote,

·      In Spain is not that important for voters the image of who is elected but all the team it follows, and here an image and message is created involving one candidate, and

·      The electoral fight in the US is made in a huge country where the elected candidate usually wins by a minimum advantage.

What happens is that in Spain, the political party’s tend to copy the electoral marketing of the US but only in the form and not in the content. They put videos in YouTube or send text messages to voters, but this are not used to mobilize people. After thinking about it, the reasons of these differences are always come to the same point; cultural differences so differences to approach the insights of the potential voters.

Here in the US, the electoral campaigns post their electoral program in the internet and then try to be more generic repeating six or eight key messages once and again. In the latest example we can see how Obama repeated this six messages using “change” as reference and with a clear message: “Yes, we can”. In the other hand we have the Spanish style, where there are more politics interests for the history of the different regions of Spain. Instead of being or democrats or republicans, there are more political party’s to support although there are the two main ones where about the 80% of the population vote in the general elections.

This is why the candidates have to try to capture that minority attention what makes the difference on the end. The two main parties, with their message and program, target two differentiated segments. Anyhow they can’t make such a strong image around them because they also have to attract the attention of other minority segments that are not their potential voters and are trying to decide which party to support depending on the changes in their program and possible alliances with the minor existent parties. They give to the content of the program a much bigger significance than the one they give to how to say it.

Getting to a conclusion, there are many cultural differences that make it different to approach the insights of the population. Differences in communications, that is how they use television or internet; differences in the content of the program and how to segment the population; and finally, there is a big difference that I haven’t gone into depth but is really significant that is the money collected for the campaign. The length of the campaigns and the high investment they have to make in them makes that the money spent in the US looks like an astronomic quantity comparing it to the amount spent by the Spanish campaigns.