Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them - Softcover

Delacourt, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771621095 ISBN 13: 9781771621090

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre, 2016

Synopsis

This second edition offers an insightful and provocative look at the inside world of political marketing in Canada and what this means about the state of our democracy in the twenty-first century from a leading political commentator.

Inside the political backrooms of Ottawa, the Mad Men of Canadian politics are planning their next consumer friendly pitch. Where once politics was seen as a public service, increasingly it’s seen as a business, and citizens are the customers. But its unadvertised products are voter apathy and gutless public policy. Susan Delacourt takes readers into the world of Canada’s top political marketers, from the 1950s to the present, explaining how parties slice and dice their platforms for different audiences and how they manage the media. The current system divides the country into niche” markets and abandons the hard political work of knitting together broad consensus or national vision. Little wonder then, that most Canadians have checked out of the political process: less than two per cent of the population belongs to a political party and fewer than half of voters under the age of thirty showed up at the ballot box in the last few federal elections. Provocative, incisive, entertaining and refreshingly non-partisan, Shopping for Votes offers a new narrative for understanding political culture in Canada.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Delacourt is a political columnist in Ottawa who writes for the Toronto Star and Ipolitics, and appears weekly on CBC and CTV. Her work, which includes three previous books on politics, has earned her the Hy Solomon Award in 2014 for excellence in public policy journalism and the 2011 Charles Lynch award for career-long coverage of politics. Shopping for Votes was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, and the John W. Dafoe Book Prize. Delacourt lives in Ottawa, ON, where teaches political journalism and communication at Carleton University.

Review

"Delacourt's Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them is likely to become the new manual for power-seekers. And while its focus is on Canada, it shows how we, Australia, Britain and the United States have borrowed from one another to create the present political situation...lively and very readable...Some power-seeking readers will study it as a how-to-manual for more political pandering. But other power seekers, we can hope, will read it as a guide to getting our country back." (Tyee.ca 2013-10-07)

"I’m pretty excited about this year's literary harvest, but there are three particular books that have captured my interest in Canadian history: And I hope that Susan Delacourt's analysis of our political system, Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (Douglas & McIntyre, Spetember), will explain to me and future historians the way our politicians have become captive to the polling and advertising industries." (Charlotte Grey Ottawa Citizen 2013-09-02)

"the engaging Shopping for Votes provides a compendium of the latest vote-courting techniques used by political operatives from all parties...The strongest section, which draws on Delacourt's talents as a reporter, focuses on recent efforts by the Conservatives and NDP to target voters interested in their policies. The early chapters, by contrast, provide useful historical context for the role of advertising in politics..." (Dan Rowe Quill & Quire 2013-09-30)

"If Stephen Harper needs some light relief after reading the latest disappointing polling numbers, he could do worse than leaf through a new book by Ottawa journalist Susan Delacourt: Shopping for Votes -- How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them." (John Ivison National Post 2013-09-05)

"...Delacourt (who was a longtime colleague and competitor in the parliamentary press gallery) has written a lively history of the advertising Mad Men and marketing gurus who increasingly have shaped our politics in the last sixty years..." (Paul Adams ipolitics.ca 2013-09-25)

"...let me strongly recommend you make room on your bookshelf (or on your Kindle) for Toronto Star journalist Susan Delacourt's latest opus: Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them...Delacourt's journalistic writing style keeps the narrative flowing and the pages turning...This book shines a light on the wacky, weird, and often-misunderstood world of political marketing..." (Gerry Nicholls The Hill Times 2013-09-30)

"By now, it's a truism that politics is dirty business. Delacourt, a political reporter for the Toronto Star, deconstructs how elected reps bait voters. They brand their parties, cloister Canadians into categories like 'old-fashioned puritans' and apathetic 'self-indulgent' and even use Tim Hortons to lure voters to the polling station. Is nothing sacred?" (Readers Digest 2013-10-10)

"...Susan Delacourt's Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them, one of the very best books about Canadian politics to appear in many years...Ms. Delacourt has pulled the themes together in an excellently researched book that widens our understanding and deepens our depression about contemporary politics -- which offers, after all, a rough mirror of who we are." (Geoffrey Simpson Globe & Mail 2013-10-05)

"Susan Delacourt's new book, Shopping For Votes: How Politicians Choose Us And We Choose Them is creating quite a stir. Delacourt's central thesis is that Canadians no longer act as citizens -- with rights and responsibilities -- but as consumers, who are motivated by self interest, not the national interest." (ProgressiveBloggers.ca 2013-10-06)

"The story in Susan Delacourt's Shopping for Votes is a familiar one, told well..." (Andrew Coyne Montreal Gazette 2013-10-08)

About this edition

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1771621095
• ISBN 13: 9781771621090
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352