Valijarollile apelleerivate reklaamide vastuvõtt 2005. aasta kohalike omavalitsuste volikogude valimisperioodil
Date
2006
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
The main goal of this research is to analyze the reception and perception of the political,
commercial advertisements and of the ones that refer to political parties during the 2005
election to local municipality. During this period the problem of ‘merchandised’ or
‘consumer oriented’ political commercials became a more urgent subject of discussions
than ever before. Although there have been academic researches on political and
commercial advertisements and on political marketing before, bachelor thesis is one of
the first that studies the reception of given advertisements.
In the theoretical part I present with the definitions and functions of advertisements.
Furthermore, I also make an introduction of the concepts on political advertisements
and explain or analyze different purposes of political marketing. The comparison
between the roles of consumer and citizen are drawn and I give a brief overview of the
advertisements’ reception process.
The empirical part of the thesis is made up from the results of 10 qualitative interviews
that were conducted within Tallinn residents aged from 18 to 37. The political interests
and activities among the interviewees varied greatly.
In my bachelor thesis I searched for answers to five following questions: 1) How do
people interpret being a citizen – in what kind of actions and beliefs does that manifest?
How important is the election process to the interpretation of the role of a citizen? 2)
How are the direct and indirect political party advertisements received and perceived 3)
How are the (commercial) advertisements that refer to the political elections received and perceived? 4) How are the strategies of political and commercial advertisements
and the style of addressing the recipient interpreted and estimated (citizen versus
consumer)? 5) How do the advertisements during the election period affect the attitude
towards election process and towards the participation in general?
The main research question was if and to what extent do „merchandised” politics and
election advertisements address their messages to consumer rather than to citizen. Do
these advertisements chance the attitude towards political elections or modify the
perception of the role of the citizen by strengthening the idea of the role of the
consumer.
Results showed that interviewees did not consider commercials to have notable force by
itself in changing already developed beliefs and attitudes towards political elections, in
the importance of national symbols, nor the identity of the citizen. But it appeared that
the advertisement “Kangelase Kohuke” was problematic and it is important to note that
at the given case the spontaneous connection to political commercialization was strong.
It was also noted that political scene is moving rapidly and stably to economical
ideology where money is the key word with the help of which a citizen is clearly placed
in to the role of a consumer. At given advertisement the negative attitude towards
merchandised political advertisements were constructed mainly because of the illegal
and public cheating aspect. The interviewees, affected by that kind of behavior, marked
that this can clearly be the reason for citizens to alienate from politics. On the other
hand, many observed and acknowledged a raise in the activeness of behavioral action -
a lot of the acquaintances of the interviewees went to cast their vote with a purpose that
political party “Keskerakond” (the assumed author of the advertisement “Kangelase
Kohuke”) would not win the elections.
Further and extensive study and research is needed in order to achieve an adequate
overview of the process of reception of the political advertisement. This thesis with its small qualitative research does not allow making representative assumptions but gives a
certain base for the future research.
Keywords
H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd, poliitiline kommunikatsioon, poliitiline kultuur, valimised, reklaam, valimisvõitlus, kohalikud omavalitsused