Hi,
Could you please write a 6000 word long essay (wordcount excluding bibliography) on the question: Are modern political parties more market-oriented and using marketing techniques to sell themselves to voters? If so, what might be the consequences for democracy?
Please use the attached readings as the baseline, especially Lees Marshment and her market oriented party model. Please be very critical of it and of Blair and New Labour overall as an example of a market oriented party.
Additionally please be critical of the “horizontality” in the new digital parties that Gerbaudo mentions in Ch 5, please argue that the supposed horizontality decreases internal party democracy.
In answering the sub question on what might be the consequences for democracy please look at both internal party democracy and broader societal democracy. When talking about broader democracy please contrast with liberalism as Chantalle Mouffe does in the “Democratic Paradox”.
Please make the conclusion and the underlying challenge of the essay based on asking whether market-oriented parties are more tied to a single ideology (I would instinctively say that yes, they are tied to Third way parties, but please provide for multiple explanations) and whether we can even separate our critique of the method (market oriented etc) with out critique of the content – the ideology that the specific parties espouse.
