Spots Electorales. El espectáculo de la democracia - Soymenos.net

PRESENTATIONWhen Roberto Alfa’s widow, Elvira Dámaso, contacted the Political Science Department at Ramón Díaz SonsecaInternational University in February 2008, we could still recall him from our master’s programme in political marketing.Roberto had been a visiting lecturer on the course for three years. He always made a big impression on hisstudents and his professionalism in a fi eld as apparently dry as running the most important political campaigns ofrecent years in Europe and Latin America was no obstacle to direct and friendly relations with everyone working inthe department. The news of his tragic death came as a great shock to us and we soon realised that our professionhad lost one of its leading lights, someone who had been able to adapt public language and concerns to politicalcommunication and always sought to bring political leaders closer to ordinary people. Roberto Alfa came from theworld of audiovisual communication and his work was marked by a decidedly media approach to elections, onewhich has been borne out in recent years by contemporary society and new technology.The legacy of his Campaign Diary, given to us by his wife so it could be studied and catalogued, was a major ethicalresponsibility for us. It was not easy to translate into academic or didactic arguments something which consistedof personal notes and (occasionally critical) professional asides about the very ideological system with which heworked so closely. Some of the personal aspects of our colleague Roberto that we have discovered were also asurprise; personal and work questions are inseparably mixed in these pages as might be expected of someone whowas at once so vocational and yet so free. However, the highly professional performance that we fi nd at each stageand on each page of his diary gave us a truthful and unique, albeit hazardous, portrait of the current state of affairsin ideas marketing, its application in real time and its dodges, mishaps and yearnings.Tackling this kind of research project was no easy task, for it was different, atypical and at the outer reaches ofwhat is expected in academic research. It was precisely for this reason that our approach was also unusual. Wefocussed on experimenting with fresh formats as part of a new line of university research projects which in thenear future are to be partnered by image foundations and centres through a newly created network. This is howwe went about it.Headed by Jorge Luis Marzo and Arturo “Fito” Rodríguez, two of our leading associate professors and directors ofthe Comunicación y política publications service, the team approached their task with complete creative freedombut also with the rigour of research based on observation and improvement. Thus the result, which is also our ownpersonal tribute to Roberto Alfa, combines a hypertexual theoretical proposal with the hypertextuality of a strikingaudiovisual work. In the text the notes complement the entries in the diary and develop them in various ways whichare on occasion specialised, on occasion prosaic, sometimes acting as reinforcement for the ideas, sometimes as acounterpoint. Like a rhizome, the text pulls us towards the practical examples of the work.Thus it is now time to present a project that goes beyond the merely academic and cannot really be pigeonholed. Itis time to disclose the thousand and one ways of approaching elections, to evaluate the communicative dimensionof an ad as the real core of new electoral strategies and to provide reasoned access to its multiple representations.It is time to understand the wealth and the complexity of democratic systems around the world, yet at the sametime to be critical of the system and enable these criticisms to come through.And above all it is time to thank the research team for their untiring dedication to this project and its seemingly endlessworking days, where our being together has given the project an emotional dimension which we could neverhave imagined. Finally, and on behalf of the university which I have headed for the last ten years, I wish to givemy special thanks to Elvira, Roberto’s partner, for her astuteness in seeing that her husband’s notes could transmitknowledge from the most human of perspectives.We hope that this will be our small contribution to the creative freedom of a fundamentally good man.Lucio CanettiVice-chancellor of Ramón Díaz Sonseca International UniversityTo begin cataloguing and analysing Roberto Alfa’s Campaign Diary, we needed an audacious research team thatcould come up with a new formula, a renewed reading of the current phenomenon of political marketing whosebody of theory needs constant updating due to its intrinsic dynamism. Right from the word go we knew that it wastime to apply some of the codes from Roberto’s teaching to this study.