Lady Luck? Women Political Consultants in U.S. Congressional Campaigns

Panagopoulos, Costas; Dulio, David A.; Brewer, Sarah E.

doi:10.1080/15377857.2011.588103

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 26 publications

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“…Up to recently, studies of the people behind campaigns have focused almost entirely on political consultants, who provide services to political campaigns without being their employees, often working on many races simultaneously (Medvic 2003;Mancini 1999;Petracca 1989;Dulio 2004;Panagopoulos, Dulio, and Brewer 2011;Medvic 2001;Farrell, Kolodny, and Medvic 2001).…”

Section: Understanding American National-level Campaignsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neither Mercenaries nor Masterminds: Campaign Staff and Consultants in American National Elections

Laurison¹

2019

Preprint

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Campaigns play a key role in shaping how Americans experience electoral politics, yet the way in which professional campaign operatives understand and approach their work has received relatively little scholarly attention. Most accounts of campaigns’ strategic decision-makers treat them as masterminds – individuals who devise tactics based on brilliant political insight or masterful data analysis. Others assume they are mercenaries, milking the electoral process for all the money they can regardless of their own ideological commitments or what might actually help candidates win elections. Neither of these approaches is sufficient to understand how political professionals understand their work; they ignore both the fundamental uncertainty of campaign effects and the particularities of the work-world of political operatives. Drawing on 79 interviews with 67 campaign staff and consultants with high-level experience in Presidential and Senate campaigns, I argue that they should be understood as participants in a field of cultural production, which functions much like other arenas where communicative materials are crafted. Gaining esteem and coveted positions within the field is most participants’ primarily motivation, and the quality of the messages, images, and strategies they produce is judged less by measurable effects on voters than by an internally-generated set of norms and ideas about best practices.

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