Persuasive Communication as a Tool of Politics and Electoral Victory

Abstract

This paper is titled: Persuasive Communication: A Tool of Politics and Winning Elections. The aim of the paper is to bring to bear the fact that politics leading to election victory by Politian’s cannot be possible without effective application of persuasive communication. The paper is anchored on two theoretical postulations of hierarchy of human needs and uses and gratification. Data were mainly collected from secondary sources particularly textbooks and other written documents and contextually presented and analyzed. The data analyzed, in this regard, revealed that political debate, advertising, campaign rallies are fundamental strategies of the political process aimed at winning elections. The paper goes further to discuss the relevance of persuasive communication in politics noting that where political office seekers fail to employ the weapon of persuasive communication, they can fail. The paper, therefore recommends, among others, research as a way of finding out what are the needs of the electorates. It also advices political candidates embarking on persuasive communication to be mindful of certain variables on their part such as their credibility, personality traits, charisma, power and so on.