Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning

Abstract

This article develops and tests a new multidimensional index — CAMPROF — that is designed to measure and compare parties' use of professionalized campaign techniques during elections. Based on the extant literature, we identify and operationalize the essential components of this new form of campaigning to create a 30-point index that is applied to the case of the 2005 German federal election. The results show the CAMPROF Index to be: (1) successful in capturing variance in parties' engagement in professionalized campaigning, and (2) capable of producing rankings that correspond to a priori expectations about how well the parties would perform. The findings are significant in that they provide preliminary confirmation of the Index's capacity to measure the concept of professionalized campaigning as well as providing new insights into the party-level dynamics that may be driving the current wave of campaign modernization. The opportunities and challenges involved in wider application of the measure to cross-national research are discussed.

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.…”

“…Concurrently, intensive efforts have been made to develop theory-driven empirical indicators of these characteristics and to measure the degree of professionalization in campaigning (Gibson and Römmele, 2009;Moring et al, 2011;Strömbäck, 2009;Tenscher, 2013;Tenscher et al, 2012;Tenscher and Mykkänen, 2013). While (often slight) differences inevitably emerge between lists of indicators and methods of measurement, on the whole we can speak of a growing consolidation of our understanding of professionalized campaigns; how to measure these; and of what factors may explain inter-party and cross-national variation in the degree of professionalism in campaigning.…”

Party bureaucrats, independent professionals, or politicians? A study of party employees

“…Farrell and Webb 2000;Gibson and Römmele 2009;Mair et al 2004). The growing number of party employees is essential in this regard because professionalisation is often perceived as grassroots amateurs being replaced by professionals employed for their expertise (Mair et al 2004).…”

Political Communication Cultures in Western Europe

“…First, in recent years, the division between professional groups has been at the fore. This is an obvious result of the media development, the professionalization of politics and political parties (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999;Gibson and Römmele, 2009;Negrine 2007;Tenscher et al, 2012), the professionalization of journalism (Weaver et al, 1998;Reese, 2008;Hanitzsch et al, 2010) and the distance between professional groups, which have increased because of lesser degrees of political parallelism (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). These developments were evidenced in the previous research referred to throughout this book.…”