First- and second-order campaigning: Evidence from Germany

Abstract

In recent years, political parties have reacted to some far-reaching transformations in their media and sociocultural environment. Respective changes and adaptations, often summarized under the catchword of ‘professionalization’, become most vivid during election campaigns. However, parties’ election campaign professionalism has seldom been ‘measured’, and it has mostly been exemplified in single case studies so far. Against this backdrop, the article presents an empirical test of the party-centered theory of professionalization. It is an intertemporal comparison of political parties’ campaign structures and strategies on the occasion of the two most recent European and national parliamentary elections in Germany. The analyses provide empirical evidence for professionalization-related changes. Plus, it is demonstrated that transformations take place at two different campaign levels, the first-order national and the second-order European level. These exemplary results should be taken into account in future empirical analyses that might reflect our methodological approach, too.

New Media - Opportunity for New and Small Parties? Political Communication before the Parliamentary Elections in Iceland in 2013

“…This is in line with the normalizing tendency found in other Nordic, European (Lilleker et.al. 2011;Strandberg 2013;Tenscher 2013) and Anglo-American countries (Gibson et.al. 2008;Gulati & Williams 2012).…”

The EU Parliament on Twitter—Assessing the Permanent Online Practices of Parliamentarians

“…Although the bulk of empirical research has largely disproven such arguably overtly optimistic claims, voices are still lauding the potential of the Internet, supposedly as it has moved from a 1.0 paradigm-in this context largely denoting "Burkean, Top-Down" (Jackson & Lilleker, 2009, p. 246) dissemination of information from the politician to the citizen-to a 2.0 rationale for Web publishing, suggesting that the interactive elements of the Web be given a more important role, often through a variety of so-called social media applications (e.g., Jackson & Lilleker, 2009;Vergeer & Hermans, 2013). In relation to this, although the notion of the permanent campaign, suggesting blurred lines between periods of campaigning and governing, was first coined in the 1970s (e.g., Blumenthal, 1980;Ornstein & Mann, 2000), the "always-on" logic of social media has led to suggestions that such continuous endeavors by politicians might flourish as a result of the technical developments briefly described above (e.g., Klinger, 2013;Tenscher, 2013).…”

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

“…In recent years, there has been growing interest in measuring political parties' campaign professionalism (Gibson and Römmele, 2009;Lisi, 2013;Moring et al, 2011;Nord, 2006;Strömbäck, 2009;Tenscher et al, 2012) in first-and second-order elections and trends of professionalization (Tenscher, 2013;Mykkänen, 2013, 2014). Two main approaches can be identified in these measurements: (1) the CAMPROF-index introduced by Gibson and Römmele (2001), slightly adjusted by Strömbäck (2009), which concentrates on one dimension, that is, campaign structures (finances, personnel, infrastructure and communicative resources), and (2) the professionalization-index introduced by Tenscher (2007) and Tenscher et al (2012) which differentiates between two dimensions: campaign structures and strategies.…”