The literature on election campaigning has been dominated by the notion of professionalized campaigning. However, political parties seem to differentiate in their campaign efforts between first-order and second-order elections. At second-order elections campaigns are less professionalized compared to national parliamentary elections. At least, this observation has been proven for parties in Germany and Finland in the EP elections 2004 and 2009. We will test these initial findings by looking at the EP election of 2014 and broaden the focus to a comparison between parties’ campaign professionalism in “old” and “new” EU member states. In doing so, the party-centred theory of campaign professionalization will be applied for the first time to Eastern European countries. Our study is based on standardized interviews with 90 campaign managers in eight Western European and six Eastern European countries. Their answers indicate some similarities in campaign professionalism, but also some differences on the party- and country-level.
