Political Parties’ Campaign Professionalism Compared

Abstract

Faced with some fundamental changes in the socio-cultural, political and media environment, political parties in post-industrialized European democracies have started to initiate substantial transformations of both their organizational structures and communicative practices. In recent times, parties have reinforced their orientation towards the needs of the electoral market (process of marketization). They increasingly adapt to journalistic routines and to media logics (process of mediatisation). And, finally, parties strive more and more for an enduring, strategically planned, rational, and sustainable communication management (process of professionalization). The panel will particularly focus on the latter development in (post-)modern political communication. Although the process of professionalization is neither restricted to campaigns nor temporary, it becomes most obvious during electoral campaigns. Consequently, the growing number of empirical studies in the field has focused on parliamentary or presidential campaigns. On the one hand, these studies have been valuable in giving insights into contemporary campaign practices. On the other, they have been criticized for several reasons: Firstly, most studies have approached campaign professionalism descriptively and/or qualitatively. Efforts in quantifying professionalism in political communication are still rare and often restricted to case studies. Secondly, those studies that have attempted to measure professionalism quantitatively have relied on a broad spectrum of indicators which have not been tested for their validity. And thirdly, there is still a lack of comparative, cross-sectional or longitudinal research which would help us to detect differences and/or similarities in campaign professionalism of political parties in different countries at different times. Against this backdrop, we want to put the concept of professionalism in political communication to a comparative test. Invited are empirical, methodological and theoretical papers that look at political parties’ campaign professionalism from a comparative, either cross-sectional and/or longitudinal, perspective.