Abstract
Colombian professional political consultants couple information technologies and local political brokering to circumvent strict voter privacy regulations that limit campaigns’ access to voters’ personal data. I argue that political consultants use information technologies to bolster traditional vertical, personality-centered political organizations, and to produce tightly controlled “cyborg political machines.” I challenge widespread notions that oppose media-based politics to traditional face-to-face politics (known also as clientelism). Instead, I show that although political elites introduced American political marketing methods hoping to modernize campaigns, the American way provided a new framework to preserve traditional authoritarian political arrangements after the extensive democratic reforms of the early 1990s.
Highlights
The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available
I refrain from using the term “neopopulism” coined by scholars of Latin America to describe the intersection of populism and media-based politics (Barczak 2001; Waisbord 2003; Weyland 2003; Cristina de la Torre 2005)
As in many other countries in Latin America, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund prescribed a set of neoliberal reforms to strengthen the Colombian economic and political systems, and to bring peace to a country marred by the War on Drugs and a guerrilla war dating back to the 1960s
Summary
Colombian professional political consultants couple information technologies and local political brokering to circumvent strict voter privacy regulations that limit campaigns’ access to voters’ personal data. These “tricks” may not be effective in persuading voters, the methodologies that political consultants sell to campaigns, like Pragmatica’s “seven variables” formula, contribute to solidify political practices that privilege top-down management over horizontal deliberation With this observation, I am not suggesting that the adoption of media technologies results in the erosion of local democracies and horizontal decision making. I refrain from using the term “neopopulism” coined by scholars of Latin America to describe the intersection of populism and media-based politics (Barczak 2001; Waisbord 2003; Weyland 2003; Cristina de la Torre 2005) This body of literature generally describes neopopulists as political leaders who deploy public opinion and marketing to legitimize their actions—instead of effectively including citizens in government—and who differentiate from their populist predecessors in their aversion to state welfarism and party structures. As I will show with the case of Uribe in the last part of this essay, in return, these local political networks gain a platform, a microphone to voice their own views, and they access resources once a candidate is in office
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