Marketing ‘ethically questionable’ politics: the case of a xenophobic political party
Mona Moufahim, Andreas Chatzidakis · Consumption Markets & Culture · 2012
The success experienced by the extreme right parties across Western Europe and the persistent loyalty of their voters has sparked the interest of academics and broader society. Some of their theses are controversial, if not unethical, but nevertheless increasingly successful in Western European democracies. This paper seeks to explain how extreme right parties address the voters and manage to overcome people's aversion for racism and xenophobia in their marketing communications. Neutralisation theory is applied as a useful theoretical framework for uncovering the ways through which racism and xenophobia are reframed and normalised, ultimately providing a political “product” which is dissociated from its ethically questionable features and becomes less problematic for voters’ consumption. Thematic analysis of communication material from a particularly successful extreme right party, i.e. the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang, provides an early indication that neutralisation may indeed be a viable route for understanding the rhetorical processes at play when communicating politically controversial positions and other ethically questionable issues more broadly. Concurrently, neutralisation theory stresses that such techniques are learned in the course of social interaction and ultimately, they are negotiated and (de)legitimised within broader socio-cultural systems. As such, it represents an important step in understanding how political parties and marketers draw on available repertoires of social and cultural narratives with a view to facilitate morally neutral consumption.