The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

Abstract

International audienceFaced with some fundamental changes in the socio-cultural, political and media environment, political parties in post-industrialized democracies have started to initiate substantial transformations of both their organizational structures and communicative practices. Those innovations, described as professionalization, become most obvious during election campaigns. In recent times, the number of empirical studies measuring the degree of political parties’ campaign professionalism has grown. They have relied on a broad spectrum of indicators derived from theory which have not been tested for their validity. For the first time, we put these indicators to a ‘reality check’ by asking top-ranked party secretaries and campaign managers in 12 European countries to offer their perceptions of professional election campaigning. Furthermore, we investigate whether any differences in understanding professionalism among party campaign practitioners can be explained by macro (country) and meso (party) factors. By and large, our results confirm the validity of most indicators applied in empirical studies on campaign professionalism so far. There are some party- and country-related differences in assessing campaign professionalism too, but the influence of most factors on practitioners’ evaluations is weak. Therefore, we conclude that largely there is a far-reaching European Union-wide common understanding of professional election campaigning

Permanent Campaigning: A Meta-Analysis and Framework for Measurement

“…Despite these limitation, focusing on studies which engage with permanent campaigning literature allows the development of a theoretically informed model for the study of permanent campaigning. The model requires empirical validation, along the lines proposed by Tenscher et al 2016, and can be developed as research responds to the diffusion and appropriation of technological innovations for political communication. The model allows us to ascertain the components of a permanent campaign and test the extent of adherence while also identifying differences within and between nations.…”

“…Over intervening decades, studies have burgeoned across nations using a range of criteria to identify and measure permanent campaigning. However, there is a lack of academic research that seeks to systematize the criteria of investigation and measurement of permanent campaigning in a similar way to studies of professionalization (Gibson and Rommelle 2001;Tenscher, Mykkänen, and Moring 2012;Tenscher et al 2016).…”

New medium, old strategies? Comparing online and traditional campaign posters for German Bundestag elections, 2013–2017

“…The newer medium of OCPs reflects a further professionalisation of political communication in the social media era. Professionalisation is caused by the superordinate trends of partisan dealignment and mediatisation and describes political parties’ adaption to a changing electorate and the increasing relevance of media logic, with respect to their campaign structures as well as their campaign strategies (Karlsen and Saglie, 2017; Tenscher et al, 2016). Although some scholars highlight de-professionalised aspects of social media campaigns in the United States (Kreiss and Jasinski, 2016), the rise of the Internet and more recently of Web 2.0 serves as a stimulus for professionalisation (Zittel, 2009).…”

Quanto influiscono i sistemi elettorali sulle campagne?

“…dai partiti e dai candidati possono assumere -specie nella fase di accreditamento di alcune competenze -caratteri molto diversi e che la variabilità è elevata se compariamo l'evoluzione nei singoli Stati (Strömbäck e Kiousis, 2014), o anche limitandola alla sola Europa (Tenscher et al, 2015). L'accentuazione di questi tratti dipende dalla tipologia di competizione elettorale e può essere influenzata anche da elementi sistemici o contestuali (una rassegna in Esser e Strömbäck, 2012), come una particolare (e anche contingente) struttura della competizione o la presenza di un determinato sistema elettorale.…”