Each of these measures focuses on non-election actions. Political parties have fallen into the trap of turning to their constituents during election years, but often fail to turn to them at other points during the political process.
Political parties must actively attempt to engage audiences directly to ensure their longevity. However, the attempt to increase participation will likely not be easy. Savigny and Temple (2010) claim that voters have grown weary of Congressmen’s weekend trips back to Congressional districts to interact with constituents and that automated replies via email have turned voters away from attempting to communicate directly with their elected officials.
However, there is hope as Meredith (2009) found that individuals who were more connected to partisan causes and political parties during non-cam-paign cycles were more likely to vote and contribute to the parties’ political candidates during election cycles. These findings echo the urgings of scholars who have said that to boost the participation rates of the American public in the political system, change had to occur not just during election cycles but throughout the entire spectrum of American politics (Dalton, 2008).
Fortunately, the relationship management paradigm of public relations offers several strategies, such as stewardship, to help foster relationship growth with key stakeholders. Political parties just have to be motivated enough to take the first step to move in the direction of mutually beneficial relationships and make legitimate attempts to motivate people to become involved in American politics for the long term.
It is the targeted focus on developing long-term relationships in the “nur-turing” variable that makes stewardship particularly promising for those fo-cused on public diplomacy. While the integrated approach identified in Golan (2013) touches on the need for short and mid-term diplomacy, the model is not complete without the “relational public diplomacy” that requires a long-term, relationship-building focus or the “long-termed nation-branding cam-paigns aimed at the reshifting of public opinion regarding a nation’s global reputation” (p. 1254).
Though this chapter provided one of the first examples of using public re-lations theory to measure rere-lationships in the political environment, its results provide several new avenues of study for like-minded scholars. For example, although trends emerged with these participants in terms of clear patterns of relationship evaluation among Democratic, Republican, and Third-Party identifiers, does that pattern transfer to other domains? While the study in-cluded a large number of participants, there were some limitations to the way the data were gathered that could impact the generalizability of the findings.
Additionally, the geographic collection sites are not representative of the en-tire nation’s suburban and rural areas. Relationships with political parties in those regions may be vastly different based on environmental and cultural factors which the relationship with the political party. Therefore the results cannot be generalized beyond the current participants. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that this is the first time the stewardship scales were tested in a setting that did not focus on nonprofit organizations or nation-building efforts. Although the scales were developed so that they could be applied uni-versally, this is the first time they have been applied. Also, in order to validate the generalization of these finding to other fields, additional work must be done.
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