Political Marketing and Voting Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review and Agenda for Future Research

Abstract

Political marketing, a marriage between politics and marketing, is a dynamic and relatively young field. Thus, it adheres to frameworks that are borrowed from other disciplines to comprehend and explain voting behavior. This makes the field more complex and fragmented. Also, this field is under-researched and in its nascent stage, notwithstanding the current increase in academic research. Therefore, it is difficult for researchers to build on prior acquired knowledge and further the field’s research. Accordingly, the current study provides a systematic review of the extant literature by utilizing the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology, which provides a thorough evaluation of the relevant literature, yielding multiple benefits. A total of 36 papers covering 20 reputed peer-reviewed journals from 2002-2023 were selected for analysis to identify theoretical perspectives, reveal main topics followed by research gaps, recommend future research avenues, and provide a comprehensive understanding. Our analysis revealed that papers striving to comprehend various facets of voting behavior utilized five different theoretical perspectives and were grouped around five topics. The results are hopefully expected to galvanize further research in this field from the theoretical as well as from a practice-oriented perspective by providing multiple actionable inputs for the relevant subject.