Contemporary political persuasion: A new clothes to the old propaganda

• Main Author: Atlagić Siniša
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Institute for Political Studies, Belgrade, Serbia 2011-01-01
• Series: Politeia
• Subjects: political propaganda; political persuasion; political marketing; public diplomacy; psychological operations; total propaganda; totalitarian propaganda
• Online Access: http://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/2232-9641/2011/2232-96411102275A.pdf

An emphasized ideological approach to political propaganda, i.e. different understandings of the concept in the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century as well has been one of the author's main reasons to study such a topic. Though the concept of propaganda was first used in relation to western democracies and, at the same time, ' indoctrination ' was used in relation to totalitarian regimes, the term 'political propaganda' was quickly associated with 'non democratic', 'dictatorship', 'totalitarian' countries. Political propaganda has been understood in a pejorative way, as indoctrination, deception or fraud. At the same time, the concepts of political persuasion, publicity, government publicity, advertizing, public relations, information operations and others have been introduced in the western democracies. This paper aims to determine whether the rejection of political propaganda in the scientific literature in the West has been theoretically based and to give a scientific explanation for the differences between this concept and the concepts it has been replaced with.