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Modes of Professional Campaigning

In recent years, political parties have reacted to far-reaching transformations in their media and sociocultural environments. These changes and adaptations, often assembled under the catchword “professionalization,” become most apparent during electoral campaigns. However, the campaign professionalism of political parties has not yet been systematically “measured,” having been examined mostly in single case studies. Against this background, we present an empirical test of the party-centered theory of professionalization. Ours is a four-country comparison of the campaign structures and strategies of political parties during the most recent European parliamentary elections. Our analyses demonstrate a wide variety in professional electoral campaigning. There are differences in campaign structures that not only point to country specifics but also to the impact of the size of the parties. We also ask whether there are differences between parties owing to their position on a right–left scale. Our findings point to some general trends in electoral campaigning that seem to be typical of societies with democratic corporatist media systems. Those similarities and country-specifics should be taken into account in future empirical analyses, which might benefit from our methodological approach.