Democratic Malaise: A Proposed Theoretical Conceptualization for Marketing Malaise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Commercial marketing is a business philosophy that places the needs of the consumer at the beginning of the sales process rather than at the end, and its practises include the development, pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods and services. The decades following the 1960s were characterized by the intrusion of marketing into politics around the world, with Western liberal democracies being early adopters of this mode. Political marketing is the adaptation of the philosophy, principles, concepts, and techniques of commercial marketing to the political world. Research shows that citizens living in democratic regimes are critical and skeptical of democratic practices. Political marketing raises ethical questions, which has led researchers to pose the hypothesis of a “marketing malaise,” connecting political marketing with citizens’ malaise about political representation. Building on these concerns and relying on the existing literature, this article proposes the first theoretical conceptualization for the marketing malaise hypothesis. As citizens’ perceptions and understanding of politics go through the media, we propose a conceptualization of marketing malaise by mobilizing an intermediate variable: the media coverage of politics. The theoretical conceptualization includes the integration of political marketing by political organizations and the media and its impacts on citizens and democracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".