Research into major party behaviour in Britain from a political marketing perspective finds that political marketing is broad in scope and offers fresh analytical tools to explain how political organizations behave. It is nevertheless a marriage between political science and marketing. It borrows the core marketing concepts of product, sales and market-orientation, and techniques such as market intelligence, and adapts them to suit traditional tenets of political science to produce an integrated theoretical framework. A party that takes a product-orientation argues for what it stands for and believes in. A Sales-Orientated party focuses on selling its argument and product to voters. A Market-Orientated party designs its behaviour to provide voter satisfaction. Exploring these three orientations demonstrates that political marketing can be applied to a wide range of behaviour and suggests its potential to be applied to several areas of political studies.

Comprehensive political marketing informs how parties determine their policies and organisation, not just how they campaign. This article applies the marketing concepts of product, sales and market orientation, combined with tools such as market intelligence, to party behaviour as a whole. Producing a comprehensive theoretical framework, it explores how a product, sales and market‐oriented party would behave and go through a marketing process. This framework is used to analyse the British Labour Party, showing how Labour moved from a product‐oriented approach in 1983, through to a sales orientation in 1987, finally achieving a market orientation – and electoral success – in 1997. This demonstrates the potential of political marketing to deepen our understanding of a wide range of political behaviour.

To date, practical and scholarly work on participatory and deliberative governance has focused on supply-side issues such as how to engage citizens in public policy. Yet little is known about the demand for public engagement, particularly from those authorised to make collective decisions. This article empirically examines how political leaders view and value public input. It draws on 51 in-depth interviews with senior national ministers from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The interviews reveal that leaders value public input because it informs their decisions, connects them to everyday people and ‘tests’ advice from other sources. Their support for participatory governing is, however, qualified; they find formal consultation processes too staged and antagonistic to produce constructive interactions. Instead leaders prefer informal, spontaneous conversations with individual citizens. This hidden world of informal elite–citizen interaction has implications for the design and democratic aspirations of public engagement.

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