Abstract

FREIDENBERG, Flavia  and  GONZALEZ TULE, Luis. Partisan Strategies, Citizen Preferences and TV Announcements: An analysis of the Mexican Electoral Campaign of 2006. Polít. gob [online]. 2009, vol.16, n.2, pp.269-320. ISSN 1665-2037.

The TV spots are an information source regarding the characteristics of political communication and help recognize the decisions that candidates and campaign-makers make in order to win an election. This article analyzes the content of the TV spots used by the three majority Mexican parties during the electoral campaign of 2006, as a mean to identify the communicational strategies developed by these parties. The main argument is that a) the citizen's electoral preferences contribute to create the strategies developed by the candidates in order to maximize their electoral options, b) the decisions made by a candidate of a certain party affects the other candidates' strategies and, c) that the competitiveness level of the election affects the content of the messages that the campaign-makers decide to include in the campaign. The research studies the electoral campaign as a process with many stages; it identifies the heterogeneity of the strategies used between the different stages and shows evidence that describes the offensive strategies of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in contrast with the defensive strategies developed by the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), when identifying themselves as the potentially winner coalition.

Keywords : TV spots; citizen preferences; partisan strategies; electoral campaign; Mexico.

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