Abstract

Starting with the review of the three books examined, this article aims to delineate a general overview about political marketing, a subject which is located somewhere among political science, communication, psychology, and marketing, and which is still not well known in the Italian academic and professional panorama. On the contrary, this approach is quite developed in the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially after Downs' book on the "economic democracy". This contribution distinguishes between two different approaches to the political marketing: the first one, "reductionist", confines political marketing to the use of sophisticated technologies of communication and polling for the electoral campaign; the second one, "holistic", considers instead the political marketing as a completely new paradigm, through which one can "read" and understand the entire complex of political phenomena. The article ends with the analysis of chances and risks regarding the application of marketing principles in the political arena.