Political Marketing in Elections: Moving From Traditional Media Agenda-Setting to Modern Case Study: The 2015 and 2017 British General Elections

In its fifties, the application of agenda-setting theory has become much more widespread than in the past, and today it can be divided into two main branches: traditional and modern. Based on agenda-setting theory political parties can focus their attention on the issues they are interested in using media and political marketing tools. For a long time, the theory's main assumptions were centered around newspapers and radio and television channels as the mass media. With the development of communication technologies and the advent of social networks, the decisive role of traditional media in elections has been challenged. Today, political parties seek to use and be more active in social networks to highlight their positions and programs. Concerning this, the present study, exploring the media behaviors of the British parties in the 2015 and 2017 general elections, sought to answer the question of how the British parties' tendencies to media were in the two mentioned-above elections. The research findings, based on the findings of the most important statistical organizations in Britain and the world, show that the 2015 and 2017 British general elections were, respectively, the turning point and the culmination of the tendency of British parties to social networks as a tool of agenda-setting in modern times. Accordingly, social media seems to be ending decades of domination by newspapers and television channels to emerge as the determining media in election campaigns.