A banner promotes the campaign of Danilo Medina and his running mate Margarita Cedeño de Fernández during the 2012 Presidential election in the Dominican Republic. (Image courtesy of Matt Green on flickr. CC BY-NC-SA.)
Instructor(s)
Maria Vidart-Delgado
MIT Course Number
21A.506
As Taught In
Spring 2014
Level
Undergraduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
This class looks at the birth and international expansion of an American industry of political marketing, with a special emphasis on Latin America. We will focus our attention on the cultural processes, sociopolitical contexts and moral utopias that shape the practice of political marketing in the U.S. and in different Latin American countries. By looking at the debates and expert practices at the core of the business of politics, we will explore how the "universal" concept of democracy is interpreted and reworked as it travels through space and time. Specifically, we will study how different groups experimenting with political marketing in different cultural contexts understand the role of citizens in a democracy.