The Electoral Agora: A Macromarketing Framework for Political Communication Systems and Voter Engagement

Abstract

Elections are among the most consequential market-like systems in any democracy, yet macromarketing has never systematically analysed them. DeQuero-Navarro et al. argued that advancing macromarketing's understanding of market–society relationships requires interdisciplinary collaboration that broadens the field's analytical scope and extends its conceptual resources to scholars working in adjacent domains. This paper answers that call by demonstrating how macromarketing's foundational principles can be applied to political communication systems to generate analytical insights that neither political marketing nor electoral scholarship has been able to produce alone. Drawing on Mittelstaedt et al.'s foundational principles, Layton's marketing systems framework, and Meade and Nason's systems-theoretic macromarketing, the paper develops the Electoral Marketing System (EMS)—an integrated conceptual framework specifying actors, communication flows, structural moderators, emotional mechanisms, and emergent outcomes—as a pedagogical tool for applying macromarketing principles in electoral contexts. The EMS is not a parallel framework to the political marketing system literature; rather, the political marketing system is best understood as one important subset operating within the broader EMS, just as the advertising industry operates within the larger marketing system. Nigeria's 2023 presidential election illustrates the EMS framework across four temporal stages—from pre-primary antecedent forces through electoral marketplace constitution, campaign period, election event, and post-election feedback effects—demonstrating how unprecedented digital mobilisation coexisted with 26.71% voter turnout, the lowest in the Fourth Republic. The engagement-participation gap is shown to be an emergent property of the EMS rather than a failure of individual campaigns, and information disorder is identified as a systemic externality of competitive mobilisation. A five-direction research agenda and a full instructional guide for educators conclude, mapping opportunities for macromarketing scholarship in electoral contexts.