Workspace:Books on how to run political campaigns
From Pirate Party UK Wiki
This is a listing of books which might be useful to Pirates on how to run political campaigns, persuasion techniques, etc.
The Political Brain
The Political Brain by Drew Weston, subtitled The role of emotion in deciding the fate of the nation, is about why voters decide who to vote for. (It's a book from a US perspective, so it has a lot of details that don't bother us). In short, the answer is: voters decide based on emotions, not rationality.
The book says thast parties must build a narrative to persuade people to support them. Page 147 states that a compleling political narrative must have the following elements:
- it should have the structure that our brains expect of a narrative so that it can be readily understood, told and retold
- it should have protagonists and antagoinsts, defining both what the party or candidate stands for and what the party or candidate cannot stand, most cetrally, what the antagonists represtent
- it should be coherent, requiring few leaps of inference or imagination to make its plot line move forward or the intentions of its central actors clear
- it should have a clear moral (and generally subordinate morals, which refer to the party's values)
- it should be vivid and memorable
- it should be moving
- it should have central elements that are readily visualised or pictured, to maximize its memorability and emotional impact
- it should be rich in metaphor, both so that it is emotionality evocative and so that it creates and reinforceas its intended analogies
- it should take elements of the opposition's story, including its metaphors, and recast them as its own
- finally, if the story is the party's master narrative, it should be a story its framers ewant to tell their children -- that could be illustrated in a children' book -- because it should be so clear, compelling and central to its members' understanding of right and wrong that they would want their children to internalise the values it embodies.