The processes of contemporary politics are increasingly informed by ideas and principles that derive from conventional marketing. This, we suggest, is intimately connected to the neoliberal ascendancy which characterises the global political environment. In this article we seek to historicise the structural and ideological embedding of economic ideas within the political realm. We argue that marketing both informs and is a product of these changes and that there are important conse quences, notably the further detaching of an already disaffected public from the electoral process. Consequently we conclude that the “marketisation” of politics has come to represent an “ideology of disconnection.”