The Wisdom of the War Room

THE WISDOM OF THE WAR ROOM: U.S. Campaigning and Americanization

by

Margaret Scammell

Research Paper R-17April 1997

PRESS POLITICS

PUBLIC POLICY

The Joan Shorenstein Center

Harvard UniversityJohn F. Kennedy School of Government

THE WISDOM OF THE WAR ROOM: U.S. Campaigning and Americanization

by

Margaret Scammell

Research Paper R-17April 1997

Copyright © 1997, President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Margaret Scammell 1

Introduction

THE WISDOM OF THE WAR ROOM: U.S. CAMPAIGNING AND AMERICANIZATION

Modern television age electioneering issometimes called the ‘new politics’ in theUnited States. Elsewhere, similar practicesprovoke anxieties about ‘Americanization.’Fashionable but loaded, the description‘Americanization’ features increasingly both inmedia commentary and academic discussion ofmodern democratic campaigning. Americansthemselves seem a little dismissive of theidea, partly because of its imperialistic over-tones, maybe also because American cam-paigning is so severely criticized in the U.S.:‘empty ritual’ according to Lance Bennett(1992:144); ‘concocted pageantry for the hoipolloi’ says Todd Gitlin (1991). If otherschoose to follow U.S. examples, they cannotsay that they have not been warned. But thereis a strong and commonly-held sense that thisis precisely what is happening, in LatinAmerica, in Europe, and, of particular interesthere, in Britain, despite individual and oftenproudly- held distinctive political traditions. Itis as predictable as revelations about the RoyalFamily that the media, in tones of suspicion,will highlight American-style salesmanship inthe forthcoming British general election, espe-cially in the presentation of ‘New Labour’(Rustin, 1996).

In recent years academic research has start-ed to come to grips with the question ofAmericanization and there are now the begin-nings of a rigorous and eloquent debate(Mancini and Swanson, 1996; Negrine andPapathanassopoulos, 1996; Negrine, 1996),fuelled by the growth of interest in compara-tive research on electioneering worldwide(Bowler and Farrell, 1992; Butler and Ranney,1992; Farrell, 1996). From this we know thatthere are striking similarities of campaigningstyles around the democratic globe: theincreasing professionalization of communica-tion; campaigns designed for the mass mediagradually eclipsing traditional forms of votermobilization; the growth of ‘image’ politicsaimed at voters perceived more or less con-sciously as consumers and so on.

However, the literature tends to view theseglobal changes as predominantly indigenously-driven developments, stemming mainly frommass communications, the collapse of great ide-ological cleavages and the weakening of tradi-tional parties and voters’ party identifications.There is some consensus about a degree of‘globalization,’ but much less about the extentand nature of American influence. The U.S. isuniversally acknowledged as the leader in cam-paign innovation, historically the first toembrace the paraphernalia of political market-ing, but it is by no means necessarily the sourceof worldwide trends (Blumler et al., 1996).

Indigenous factors are most likely the mainmotors of change and, certainly, that is thecase with respect to the history of British cam-paigning (Kavanagh, 1995; Scammell, 1995;Wring, 1995). That is not the end of the storyof American influence, however. It is clear thatthere is massive global interest in U.S. cam-paigns, which news media report nearly asextensively as domestic stories (Gurevitch andBlumler, 1992). It is no exaggeration to speak ofan alluring ‘mythology of the great power ofU.S. election campaign practices,’ as Manciniand Swanson (1996) put it in their excellentintroduction to Politics, Media and ModernDemocracy; of a belief that Americans are‘much cleverer in the election propaganda,’ as1950s Conservative campaign advisor JohnProfumo once remarked (Cockerell, 1989:15)The attractions pile up to make the U.S. theMecca of political campaigning: the burgeoningindustry of political consultants with its asso-ciated and extensive campaign literature, andthe extraordinary accessibility of these consul-tants and their willingness to proclaim theirknowledge; the advanced state of communica-tions technology and complexity of the U.S.media market; and the multiplicity of electoralraces and their relatively high internationalprofile. It is hardly surprising if campaignersaround the world look to America for newideas and innovations.

This article seeks some fresh purchase on thepossibilities of American influence, on theprospects and potential for American campaign-ing strategies and techniques to travel abroad. Itseeks to do this in two ways. First, by a criticalexamination of one of the defining characteris-tics of modern campaigns, ‘professionalization.’

Margaret Scammel was a Fellow at the Shorenstein Centerin the Spring of 1996. She can be reached at the Universityof Liverpool, Department of Communication Studies,Roxby Building, Liverpool, UK L69 3BX.

2 The Wisdom of the War Room: U.S. Campaigning and Americanization

Second, and closely linked, by an investigationinto the sources of ideas which underpin U.S.campaigning rationale.

Recent research is virtually unanimous inhighlighting the global trend to increasingly‘professional’ electioneering, and the U.S. withits industry of political consultants, is univer-sally accepted as the professional exemplar parexcellence. Curiously, however, the literature ismuch less precise and convincing about whatprofessionalism means in the campaign con-text. The following pages focus on U.S. cam-paigning with these questions in mind: in whatways does it make sense to describe U.S. cam-paigns as ‘professional,’ how is this ‘profession-alism’ manifested and what are the conse-quences for campaign practice? How valid, evenin America, is this generally-accepted definingfeature of American-style campaigns?

Our starting place draws on the extensivesociological literature in which professions aredefined by certain criteria, most importantly:collective control over entry into the profes-sion, a self-policed ethical code and core skills,and definable, theoretically-based bodies ofknowledge. It is immediately obvious that thefirst two criteria are problematic. The third,however, may be more possible. A self-con-scious quest to professionalize campaign com-munication has been a goal and a theme oftrade literature at least since World War I(Bernays, 1923; Sproule, 1989). It is, indeed, theaim of much contemporary ‘how to’ campaign-ing literature, broadly to make the winning ofvotes less art and more science.

One might anticipate, therefore, that themore professional campaigning is, the more itwill be possible to demonstrate clear lines fromgeneral theoretical principles to practice.Further, the more professional U.S. campaignsare in this sense, the more ‘scientific’ theircampaigning knowledge, the more likely theyare to offer exportable models and to present apicture of the future of the rest of the democra-tic world.

The investigation into the sources of cam-paigners’ ideas should shed some light on theextent of professionalization of campaigningknowledge. It also leads us into other surpris-ingly under-explored territory, despite therecent upsurge of academic interest in cam-paigns. Most attention has focused on the‘what’ questions of campaigns: what are cam-paigners doing, and with what consequencesfor political conduct, voter information andinvolvement, political discourse, leadership

and democracy in general. There has beenmuch less attention to the ‘why’ questions,except in rather particular terms, to explainstrategies and tactics in specific campaigns, orretrospectively to apply theoretical models(e.g., rational choice, marketing theory) toexplain campaign processes. There has been nosystematic inquiry into the sources of the ideaswhich lie behind campaigning strategy, andthus little knowledge of the theoretical influ-ences which are played out in practice.

The purpose here is to examine why cam-paigners behave as they do, by means of aninvestigation into the ideas and influenceswhich underpin campaigners’ thinking. In itselfthis may help us in the difficult process of sepa-rating out effects of media change from changesin campaigning practice. It may help correct thetendency of many accounts, almost by default,to over emphasize the force of technology and,especially, television in the transformation ofpolitical communication. The media/campaignnexus is clearly central but it is only part of thekey to understanding modern campaigning.Equally crucial are perceptions of relationshipbetween the party/candidate and the voters;that is to say, campaigners operate on the basisof views of the electorate, ideas about persua-sion and the winning of elections which funda-mentally shape their exploitation of the com-munication technologies.

The investigation is based on three mainsources. First, content analysis and close read-ing of the U.S. political consultants’ journalCampaigns and Elections since its inaugurationin1980. Its contents are to a certain extentbound to reflect the particular interests of itsvarious editors. Nonetheless, it is the leadingtrade journal in the U.S., an explicit ‘how to’magazine and has branched out in recent yearsto run regular training seminars. It is reason-able to assume that it will provide a fair generalguide to consultants’ ideas. The second sourceis the leading ‘how to win’ guidebooks and arti-cles, written by consultants themselves, ratherthan by others such as marketing professionals(Guber, 1988; Guzetta, 1981; Hiebert et al.,1975; Napolitan, 1972; Shadegg, 1972; Thurberand Nelson, 1995; Womack et al., 1988; Woo,1980). The third is interviews with leadingRepublican and Democratic consultants.1

Before continuing, however, it is importantto look at least briefly at the fundamental butproblematic concept of Americanization.

Campaigning Worldwide: Globalizationor Americanization?

There are three major strands to the debatethus far which may be summarized as follows:globalization equals Americanization; globaliza-tion does not equal Americanization; and global-ization as modernization, in which the U.S. isthe most modern country.

Globalization Equals AmericanizationAmericanization implies that the U.S. is lead-

ing trends in a direct way: through the export ofAmerican-style campaigning, through employ-ment abroad of American consultants, by theeducation through participation and observationof foreign campaigners in the U.S.; through theexport of campaigning ideas from Americathrough the U.S. campaign literature andthrough global acceptance of the U.S. as themost important role model of how to run cam-paigns and how to manipulate media/technologyto persuade voters (Mancini and Swanson, 1996).The booming market for U.S. political consul-tants across the world, especially in LatinAmerica, lends some credence to this view(Angell et al., 1992). ‘In country after country[American consultants] are bringing U.S. elec-tion technology and expertise to candidates andpolitical parties,’ according to a special interna-tional feature in the U.S. trade magazineCampaigns and Elections (West, 1989). ‘Some ofthose involved are convinced that the potentialin overseas markets is virtually limitless.’

The true extent of U.S. involvement abroad isalmost impossible to pin down because clientparties and candidates frequently prefer secrecyfor fear of a damaging perception that their cam-paigns are being run by Americans (West, 1989).However, there is clear evidence that Europe isalso a direct employer of U.S. expertise, datingat least from Joe Napolitan’s campaign forGiscard d’Estaing in 1974. In Britain, the partiestend to deny any significant input from U.S.consultants, although there is no doubt thatthey look across the Atlantic, rather than theChannel, for campaigning ideas (Kavanagh,1996; Scammell, 1995). Moreover, there is clearevidence both of imitation and of direct employ-ment of U.S. expertise, e.g., the ground-breakingbiographical Kinnock broadcast in 1987, basedon Hubert Humphrey’s What Manner of Man;Labour’s current attempt to emulate Clintoncampaign organization and to borrow, apparent-ly fairly directly Clintonesque slogans (‘New

Labour’); the hiring of Reagan’s pollster RichardWirthlin who worked for the Conservatives inthe early 1990s (Bruce, 1992); the use of hard-hitting negative advertising, such as Saatchi’sdemonization of Tony Blair in the summer of1996, which is widely perceived as a lift fromU.S. ideas.

Globalization Does Not Equal AmericanizationGlobalization may instead describe a process

of convergence in which indigenous factors(most importantly television and changing pat-terns of partisan identification) are the drivingforces. This is the predominant view and itemphasizes the diversity, richness and strengthof national traditions and systems as resistanceto Americanization. In this view of globaliza-tion, U.S. may still export and act as a rolemodel but direct U.S. influence is far less impor-tant than indigenous factors. America may evenact, as it sometimes does, as an anti-role model(Blumler et al., 1996). Moreover, the flow ofcampaign expertise is not entirely uni-direction-al. As Negrine (1996:164) points out some coun-tries, for example, Greece, look more to Europethan the U.S. while occasionally the U.S. itselfmay import expertise. The British ConservativeParty, for instance, supplied assistance and wasapparently influential in the George Bush cam-paign of 1992, while the services of the Tories’advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi havebeen engaged in Russia, for the Conservatives inDenmark, the Dutch Social Democrats and theIrish Fianna Fáil (Webb, 1992).

Globalization as ModernizationThis is the most theoretically elegant, and

contentious of the the three views. Put briefly,modernization (Mancini and Swanson, 1996) isdriven by socio-political and technologicalchanges which have resulted in the weakeningof parties and the emergence of a powerful rolefor the mass media. These characteristics of‘modern’ societies result in particular types ofcampaigning: political parties becoming less ide-ological, moving towards catch-all parties(Kirchheimer, 1966) which raise consensus atelection times in the hope of being elected; per-sonality becomes more important as ideologybecomes less important; and at the same timeparties pay more attention to campaigning tech-niques as the means to victory. These featuresof modernization, increasingly apparent in alldemocracies, are especially marked in the U.S.Americanization here is a kind of shorthand

Margaret Scammell 3

term ‘for describing a series of changes in thesocial, political, and economic makeup of theWest . . . that prepares the ground for the adop-tion of American practices’ (Negrine andPapathanassopoulos, 1996). Thus, the term‘Americanization’ may still be descriptivelyhelpful and moreover may provide clues as tothe direction in which modernization every-where will take democratic practice.

It is clear from this that both Americanizationand globalization are contested terms. The keypoint for my purposes, however, is that there issome consensus that ‘Americanization’ is usefulas a shorthand description of global trends andthat the U.S. is the leading exporter and rolemodel of campaigning.

Americanization and Professionalization

All the distinctive features of modern cam-paigning — political marketing, personalization,escalating levels of technological sophistication— share a common theme, ‘professionalization’(Farrell, 1996). Blumler et al., (1996) characterizethe modern campaign precisely as the profes-sionalized paradigm. This approach may be crit-icized on historical grounds. Virtually any peri-od of mass democratic electoral history, in theU.S. and Britain at least, will offer good evi-dence of increasing ‘professionalization’ com-pared to earlier campaigns, as politicians adaptto changing media and electoral environments.Present day concerns about the impact of adver-tising and public relations in politics echo thepropaganda debates of the 1920s and 1930s(Sproule, 1989). However, there are two sensesin which these authors, and others, suggest thatmodern ‘professionalization’ is qualitatively dif-ferent.

Specialization: The explosion of new commu-nication technologies over the last 40 years hasfostered a profusion of specialist technicalexperts in such matters as polls, computers andsoftware, the internet, television presentationand advertising. Farrell makes a useful distinc-tion between capital-intensive campaigns andlabor-intensive campaigns. The more capital-intensive the more professional (modern and‘American’) the campaign because the new tech-nologies require new sets of consultants andnew batteries of technocrats. Labor-intensivecampaigns are essentially ‘amateur’ run, relyingheavily on party workers and volunteers formass canvassing and public meetings. Thus,specialization is largely driven by technology,

and of course, the money needed to hire theexpertise. This is partly a quantitative argu-ment, which is saying roughly, that the degreeof specialization has accumulated to the pointwhere campaigns qualitatively become altered.

Replacement/displacement: This takes spe-cialization a stage further by arguing that partystrategists have been replaced by non-party ‘pro-fessional’ strategists. Employed at first for theirexpertise with the technologies mentionedabove, the professionals become increasinglycentral to campaign strategy and even policy-making. They claim and are perceived to possessexpertise essential to the winning of elections.This links to what Swanson and Mancini (1996),after Habermas, call the ‘scientificization’ ofpolitics. Scientificization entails more than theintegration of technical expertise. It elevateselectoral victory, rather than the pursuit of poli-cy goals, as the prime aim of politics. The tech-nological drive towards scientificization is com-pounded by the general weakening of the role ofthe party due to the decline in strong partyattachments among voters. The decline is bothcause and effect of the professionalization ofelectioneering. Parties wishing to extend theirappeal beyond traditional constituencies areforced to off-load ideological baggage. The lessclear the ideological divide between parties themore they need to rely on personality, packagingand other forms of manufactured difference. Themore the parties grow alike the less likely theyare to retain the strong commitment of voters.And so on. Otto Kirchheimer (1966) describedthis process as the transformation of WesternEurope’s mass parties into ‘catch-all,’ pragmaticvoter-oriented parties. Bowler and Farrell’s com-parative study of electioneering (1992) notes acorrespondence between catch-all parties andpolitical marketing. At first sight there is anobvious kind of logic here, given some flesh bythe experience of the British general election of1992. According to then Conservative commu-nications director Shaun Woodward: ’. . . whatwe were confronted with was very much like amarketing exercise trying to establish a differ-ence between brands that were basically alike.The answer was obvious — packaging’(Scammell, 1995:240).

However, the catch-all thesis is not entirelyconvincing and there is empirical evidence tosuggest that parties have frequently remainedideologically distinct (Keman, 1994; Klingemannet al., 1994). Moreover, many of the leadingpatrons of professionalization, for example,Reagan and the New Right in the U.S. and


Thatcher in Britain, have also been the mostideologically committed. So where does thisleave us with respect to professionalization?There is some agreement that modern cam-paigns are characterized by increasing specializa-tion and replacement of party campaign man-agers by outside expertise. The causes of thisseem to be a combination of new technologyand a weakening of the role of parties, althoughthe part played here by ideology, and the lack ofit, is less clear-cut. Most importantly for ourpurposes, there is also the suggestion that thenew campaign professionals possess uniquely abody of knowledge and ‘consummate propagan-distic skill’ (Habermas, 1989:221) consideredessential to electoral success. This takes us backto our original point of departure concerning thenature of professionalism in modern campaign-ing, to examine whether ‘modern’ campaignersare more professional, not simply in the sense oftechnical expertise but that they operate on thebasis of an increasingly ‘scientific’ understand-ing of the political market and voter persuasion.

Professional Campaigning in the U.S.The commonest measure of the growth of

professionalism in U.S. campaigning is theemergence of the industry of political consultingover the last 30 years. Where once communica-tions expertise was hired to parties and candi-dates from people primarily engaged in commer-cial work, now political consultation thrives asa form of business independent of other types ofincome production. The American Associationof Political Consultants was established in 1969and only a handful of people attended its found-ing meeting at Lincoln Center in New York. Itnow claims more than 800 active members, pre-dicts more than 1,000 by the end of the centuryand boasts that it handles campaign businessworth more than one billion dollars a year(AAPC, 1996). Ron Faucheux, editor of the trademagazine Campaigns and Elections, estimatesthat the industry is much bigger than even theAAPC claims, employing some 7,000 peoplewho work for a living on campaigns.2

Undoubtedly, political consulting is now aflourishing business, but to what extent might itlegitimately be deemed a profession? Our work-ing definition of a profession includes the fol-lowing elements: control over entry; a self-regu-lating code of conduct; definable bodies ofknowledge, supported by a systematic body oftheory; training and certification by recogniz-able standards that individuals are qualified in

that body of knowledge; full-time employmentof professionals in the field; and formal organi-zation of professionals into societies whichdefend professional standards and protect mem-bers interests (Jackson, 1970; Norris, 1996;Vollmer and Mills, 1966).

Political consulting lacks one of the funda-mental criteria of hard-core professions such asmedicine or law: control over entry. There aresound reasons why this may never be desirablein a democracy. Anyone may run for electedoffice in the U.S., provided they meet relativelyfew legal requirements, and equally they maychoose anyone to campaign on their behalf. Thisis commonly accepted as a democratic right.There are some parallels here with journalism,another disputed profession, where any attemptto license entry might threaten basic democraticfreedoms of speech.

In other ways, however, political consultingcarries stronger claims to professionalism. It isnow a full-time occupation in the U.S. and thereare signs of an emerging common identity, ofpolitical consulting with its special sets of skillsas distinct from other trades and crafts. Thegrowth of the AAPC bears witness to this, andis in itself a sign of professionalism. A secondindicator is the development of specialist cam-paign knowledges. The last 30 years have seen aproliferation of different kinds of specialties. Atfirst these depended almost completely on tech-nical expertise, for example polling advice oradvertising production, but now have expandedacross a much wider range of campaign activi-ties, which require few or no particular techni-cal skills: e.g., direct mail fund-raising, mediabuying, conference, event and meeting planning,political researching, and so on. These havebecome sufficiently accepted so that growingnumbers of consultants can earn livings provid-ing these services to candidates on a more orless contractual basis.3

A third sign is the self-conscious attempt toprofessionalize the business of campaigningthrough training and education. Outside theU.S., in Britain for example, election campaigntraining is the near exclusive preserve of theparties and bookstore ‘how to’ manuals arelargely aimed at non-party pressure groups andlobbies. In the U.S., despite the fairly extensiveprograms offered by the major parties, trainingis increasingly privatized. Campaigns andElections ‘Political Pages’ (1996-7) lists 50 orga-nizations and universities offering campaigningeducation courses and seminars. Despite oppor-tunities here for a smart and relatively painless

Margaret Scammell 5

buck, there is also evidence of genuine attemptsto improve the general competence of campaignmanagement, to bring cool analysis andthoughtful order to the chaos of campaigning.Campaigns and Elections, for instance, wasestablished precisely with all of these goals inmind: to be a profitable ‘how to’ journal ‘bymaking modern management techniques avail-able to the many instead of the few’ (Reed,1980). The Graduate School of PoliticalManagement, now at the George WashingtonUniversity, was founded explicitly in 1987 to be‘both a stimulus to the creation of a professionand a benchmark by which progress towards aprofession could be measured.’4 The schooladvertises itself as the ‘nation’s only master’sdegree program in professional politics.’ There issomething peculiarly American about the term‘professional politics.’ In common usage amongconsultants it seems to mean primarily cam-paigning: persuasion, the winning of votes andpopularity, lobbying and issues management.Questions of public policy and governance arenot entirely unrelated but are considered sepa-rate matters. Mark Goodin, former RepublicanCommunications Director, offers an extremeversion of this view, claiming that the skills ofcampaigning are ‘directly antithetical’ to theskills of good governance.5

This leads us to a fourth and crucially defin-ing characteristic of professionalism, ethics.Typically professions operate ethical, normallyself-policing codes. In his discussion of journal-ism, Broddason (1994) links ethics to thenotion of sacredness of occupations: ethicalcodes are underpinned by ideas of the nobilityof professional goals and of self-sacrifice intheir pursuit. This is a tricky area for politicalpersuaders who wallow in a reputation asunscrupulous, Machiavellian manipulatorspopularized in such Hollywood films as ‘BobRoberts’ and ‘The Candidate.’ In Britain recent-ly, a leading Labour politician, Clare Short,called Tony Blair’s advisers, ‘the people in thedark’ (Short, 1996), a turn of phrase whichrecalls that ‘Old Nick’ Machiavelli was oncesynonymous with the devil.

Contrary to popular myth, the business is notwithout ethical concerns. The AAPC requiresits members to sign a copy of a code of profes-sional ethics which proscribes, among otherthings, activities which degrade the practice ofpolitical campaigning, which foster racism orunlawful discrimination, or lie about opponentsand misuse clients’ funds. It also has claims tonobility of purpose. ‘American political consul-

tants are, in a sense, informal officials of thenation’s democratic electoral system,’ who pro-vide millions of dollars worth of pro bono ser-vice to candidates and parties and ‘work dili-gently to improve opportunities’ for women andminorities (AAPC, 1996). However, as ChrisArterton, dean of the Graduate School ofPolitical Management, acknowledges ethics arerelatively undeveloped within political consult-ing, even by comparison with journalism orcommercial advertising. ‘I think what has notyet been born is a set of professional responsibil-ities, ethics, guidelines or constraints which sur-round the application of techniques . . . You getethics in politics, in terms of campaign financeand conflict of interest in terms of lobbying anddisclosure of sources of lobbying money and soforth. But that doesn’t go to the kind of personalcomportment and standards of thought that weought to require of a profession. It doesn’t go tothe sacredness of what is meant by a group ofpeople who ought to think of themselves as thecenturions of democracy.’6

Are such standards really possible or, moreimportantly, voluntarily enforceable in a busi-ness which of its nature is fiercely competitiveand where the only marketable measure of suc-cess is victory? Ethical considerations oftenappear arbitrary, at the mercy of the candidates’scruples, or imposed from outside by mediaexposure and public opinion. Articles concerninggeneral ethical principles are rare, almost to thepoint of extinction, in the 16-year publicationhistory of Campaigns and Elections (paceFaucheux, 1996; Tucker and Heller, 1987). Theyare equally unusual in the ‘how to’ guides,although there are sometimes justifications ofthe democratic benefits of modern campaigning(Faucheux, 1995; Luntz, 1988; Maarek, 1992;Napolitan, 1972; Steinberg, 1976). One is leftwith the impression that the ethical code formodern campaigning is ‘what we can get awaywith.’ Public embarrassment due to press expo-sure is probably the largest single influence onU.S. campaigning conduct. ‘Do you want to readabout yourself doing this,’ as Dan Carol, researchdirector for the Democratic National Committeeduring 1992, put it, in his practical guide toethics for political researchers.7 It follows then,that the dirtiest campaigns should be foundmostly in the lower order electoral races, whichare relatively free from vigorous media scrutinyand the truth tests of the ‘ad-watch’ columns andthere seems to be some evidence, certainly anec-dotal, that this is indeed the case,8 supported bythe experience of the 1996 second-order races.


As yet, then, the emergence of a full-timeoccupation, a common identity and develop-ment of unique and definable sets of skills maybe more properly described as commercializa-tion rather than professionalization, despitesome fledgling attempts to create consensusaround professional norms. It would also benaive to underestimate the importance ofmoney as a motive in the growth of politicalconsultancy as a full-time business. In 1976 vet-eran consultant Sanford L. Weiner could boastthat he and his colleagues were in it for love: ‘Inour short history, no one has ever walked awayrich’ (Weiner, 1976). Since then money hasflooded into campaigning, not so much at thetop end where always expensive presidentialraces have been brought under some control byfederal spending limits, but in the relativelyunregulated lower-order contests. It has beencalculated that total campaigning costs for allcandidates at all levels of U.S. government haveincreased from some 425 million dollars in 1972to 3.2 billion in 1992 (Polsby and Wildavsky,1996:67). It is possible now to make money inthe business. In private, consultants tell tales ofthose who encourage their candidates to funnelcampaign funds, not into areas of anticipatedeffectiveness but into high profit-margin sectors.Privately, also, consultants frequently workwith each other, so that if one is hired s/he willchannel business to another in a kind of kick-back arrangement, which, as Arterton argues, isunethical precisely because there is no prior dis-closure of the deal to the candidates.9 Moreover,there are signs that the ‘professionalization’wheel is turning full circle: 30 and 40 years agoexpertise was fed into the political process frommainly commercial consultants in the marketresearch and public relations fields; thenemerged an independent trade of full-time polit-ical consultants; now increasingly these sameconsultants are tapping into corporate marketsto top up profits squeezed by increasing compet-itive pressures in the political field (Segal, 1996).

Professionalization, then, so often treatedunproblematically as the hallmark of American-style modern campaigning, is itself highly prob-lematic in the U.S. Moreover, the mushroomingof the political consultancy business highlightsjust how untypical American politics is. It is nocoincidence that political consultancy originat-ed as a cottage industry in the vast state ofCalifornia with its diverse and transient popula-tion, weak party organization and tradition ofnon-partisanship (Sabato, 1981). Throw moneyand high-tech mass media into this mix and it is

clear that there are both incentives and impera-tives for the growth of political consultancywhich are peculiarly American. In most estab-lished European democracies the opportunitiessimply do not yet exist for a flourishing inde-pendent political consultancy market. Electoralcontests are fewer; European parliaments nor-mally every four/five years compared to everytwo for the U.S. House of Representatives, tosay nothing of the many statewide and otherpublic offices. ‘It is estimated that there aremore than 50,000 public elections in the UnitedStates of America each year . . . Our nation is aliving laboratory for democracy in action’(AAPC, 1996). With some exceptions, the tradi-tional Western European parties remain relative-ly strong, both organizationally and in terms ofvoter identification, parliamentary rather thanpresidential systems are predominant, there isless room to maneuver for individual candidatesand generally far less money in the system.Most European countries prohibit paid politicaladvertising on television, which alone accountsdirectly and indirectly for the bulk of U.S. cam-paign spending.10 Thus commercialization onthe U.S. scale is not likely in the near future inWestern Europe, despite the emergence of indi-vidual political consultants and agencies whosell their skills internationally.11 The businesshas emerged more strongly in Latin America,where the conditions seem more conducive(presidential systems, weak parties, paid adver-tising permitted, etc.) and observers have notedthat ‘electoral campaigns are arguably muchmore Americanized now than in Europe’ (Angellet al., 1992)

However, if the business of U.S. campaigningis more commercial than professional, thereremains claims that at least campaigningknowledges are becoming more ‘scientific.’Campaigning in the U.S. has become sufficient-ly specialized and its skills sufficiently codifiedto enable the creation of a master’s degree pro-gram and embryonic public educational andtraining system. In this sense of professional-ism, the U.S. remains the world’s clear leader.

Campaigning Knowledge in the U.S.

It is an old adage that there is no general the-ory of campaigning and that first-hand experi-ence is the only truly valuable teacher.Campaigners are notoriously reluctant to talk ingeneral about the forces that influence votersand are much more comfortable dealing in

Margaret Scammell 7

detail with the specifics of particular races. Yet,if campaigning knowledge is becoming moreprofessional it should be moving precisely in thedirection of general theory, much as modernmarketing has done. What follows is an attemptto make sense of the rather nebulous area ofcampaigning ideas to discover to what extentU.S. campaign managers are influenced by:

academic theorycommercial marketing theorypolitical folk wisdom, broadly defined to include personal and collective cam-paign experience, custom, habit and gut instinct.

A fundamental premise is that these three cate-gories provide the main repositories of knowl-edge for campaigners.

Social science offers campaigners the mostrigorous sources of knowledge, providing a cor-pus of empirical research, spanning more than50 years, into voting behavior, media effects andthe processes of individual and mass persuasion.Yet, examinations of British campaigning reveala gulf between campaign practice and academictheory.12 One would expect a similar finding inthe U.S., and this has been largely confirmed byresearch for this article. The worlds of academicinquiry and campaign management ‘rarely over-lap, and when they do, the basis of knowledgeand evidence is often quite different’ (Thurber,1995:1-2). They are driven by quite differentgoals, time frames and standards of validity, andcampaigners are usually operating precisely inthe margins which are not well explained by thebroader frameworks of academic analysis.Campaigners, searching for practical solutionsand clear-cut answers, claim to be frustrated bythe jargon, by the mass of judicious qualificationand reluctance to simplify characteristic ofpolitical science analysis. Ann Lewis, deputycommunication manager of Clinton/Gore 1996,identifies a major drawback of political sciencefrom a campaigner’s point of view: the data istoo old. It uses ‘large amounts of material fromyears past, and that’s a long time ago. Voterbehavior changes very quickly.’13 This is not tosay that there is no social science in campaign-ing, but that its overt and explicitly acknowl-edged influence is relatively minor. However,some consultants believe that this is a weak-ness. Charlie Black, for example, strategist forBush in 1992, believes that the best consultants(the late Lee Atwater, working for Bush in 1988,and the recently-disgraced Dick Morris for

Clinton, 1994-6) have the edge precisely becausethey do pay attention to academic literature,particularly on history, socio-demographics andpatterns of voting behavior.14 Campaigns andElections also made conscious efforts to bridgethe academic/campaign divide. Articles by uni-versity professors in media and communica-tions, marketing and political science were fea-tured regularly during its first six years, buthave noticeably reduced since. Current editor,Ron Faucheux, argued that with the best will inthe world it was difficult to maintain regularlinks: ‘Practitioners think that political scien-tists are not studying problems of interest andare therefore not helpful.’15

Commercial marketing theory, less scientificbut more dynamic, seems to offer a promisingsource of ideas for campaigners: research toolsto understand the political market and general-izable rules for the development of strategiesand communication campaigns. A number ofstudies have traced the development of politicalmarketing, both in the U.S. and elsewhere overthe last 30 or so years (Bowler and Farrell, 1992;Kavanagh, 1995; Luntz, 1983; O’Shaughnessy,1990; Sabato, 1981; Scammell, 1995). Some haverecommended its use as the most appropriateway to turn the art of campaigning into a ‘par-tial science’ (e.g., Kotler, 1981; Luntz, 1988;Maarek, 1995; Mauser, 1983; Steinberg, 1976).The application of marketing has also been citedas a prime reason for electoral success: ‘market-ing made the difference between winning andlosing [in the U.S.] in 1992’ (Newman, 1994).The introduction to the inaugural issue ofCampaigns and Elections (Reed, 1980) made thepoint in more general terms:

Only one in six political candidates wins.Only one in six businesses succeeds. Whatmakes the difference between winning andlosing in a political campaign? Is it thesame thing that makes the differencebetween succeeding and failing in busi-ness? Yes! In political campaigns and inbusiness, it is management that makes thedifference. Management of resources:money, media and people.For Philip Kotler (1981) political campaigning

has always had a marketing character, and simi-larities of the salesmanship processes in busi-ness and politics far outweigh the differences.Collins and Butler (1996) suggest further thatmarketing theory teaches political sciencelessons in party behavior. ‘Marketing is not anactivity which political parties may indulge in


at their discretion; it is a constant and necessarypolitical function which they attend to implicit-ly or explicitly, successfully or otherwise.’

That is, even if parties are not explicitlyaware of it, they behave in a strategic fashionwithin the political market that is ‘analogous tocommercial organizations,’ working to becomemarket leaders or challengers, or content to befollowers or hold a niche position (Porter, 1985).

Marketing strategy seems to offer campaign-ers the Holy Grail of a general theory of cam-paigning and this is the point made by Kotler:‘Marketing strategy is at the heart of electoralsuccess because it forces a campaign to puttogether, in a very short period of time, a win-ning relatively stable coalition of diverse andsometimes irreconcilable groups’ (1981). GaryMauser (1983) draws upon the 20-year-old bodyof marketing knowledge to offer ‘strategic posi-tioning procedure’ as the professional approachto campaign management.

‘Strategy’ is a much-worked word by U.S.political consultants but a reading of the tradeliterature suggests that its meaning is not well-understood and that its implementation is by nomeans common, even in the better-funded elec-toral races. Consultant Joel Bradshaw (1995)complains that most campaigns lack a clearstrategy, by which he means a clear sense ofwhat they are trying to accomplish. While gen-erally true, this is especially apparent in lower-ballot races, according to Republican consul-tants Hargrave and Snodgrass (1992). The evi-dence of the trade literature supports them. TheRoad to Victory (Faucheux, 1995), the ‘best ofthe best’ from Campaigns and Elections,devotes only 64 (11 percent) of its 592 pages tothe chapter on general strategy, message andplanning and much of this could not be properlytermed strategy, for example: pages of lists of‘do’s and don’ts’ tips, articles of advice on howto overcome your candidate’s odd-soundingname (rhymes are useful, we are told, ‘on dutywith Schuette’), and how to combat eleventh-hour attacks. Content analysis of the magazineover 16 years suggests that this probably overes-timates the attention paid primarily to ques-tions of general strategy.16 While some 25% ofthe journal’s articles were devoted to the organi-zation of campaigns, most of these concernedpolling, research, computers and communica-tions technology. One might assume that ques-tions of strategy would feature prominently inthe various educational curricula, but theGeorge Washington School, for example, offersjust two courses on campaign strategy and plan-

ning compared to five on polling and data analy-sis, three on fund-raising and two on computerapplications for politics (GSPM, 1995-6). Itseems fair to conclude that strategic thinkingamong campaign consultants is far less devel-oped than within commercial marketing. After10 years ‘political marketing has almost caughtup with . . . dog food’ (Meyer, 1990). Not quite.

The third category, political folk wisdom, isanticipated to be the most significant source ofideas for campaigners. Folk wisdom is taken tomean that campaigning knowledge is basedlargely on experience and observation, learningby results (Hershey, 1984). Winning campaignsprovide the models to copy and losing ones theexamples to avoid. However, campaigns arenotoriously imprecise learning situations. It isdifficult to isolate and measure with any preci-sion the impact of particular tactics and strate-gies. The increasing use of polls, tracking sur-veys, focus groups, dial groups and ‘mall testing’can only partially overcome this difficulty. Thecost of research, in any event, is prohibitive out-side the top-of-the-ticket races and even therethe campaigners’ need for rapid decisionsrestricts survey possibilities. Democratic pollsterPeter Hart claimed that the results of just onefocus group changed Walter Mondale’s entirecommunication strategy during the 1984 pri-maries.17 In ideal circumstances there wouldhave been at least six focus groups. In practice,surveys may be most useful as quick and roughguides to campaigners’ intuitions. The notoriousprison furlough ads on behalf of Bush in 1988were decided ultimately not by polls but by LeeAtwater’s idiosyncratic methods for gauging pub-lic opinion, in this case eavesdropping on familyconversations at a Harley Davidson conven-tion.18 While the general trend is towardsincreasingly research-driven campaigns, this asyet has not lessened the need for battle-steeledconsultants with an instinctive flair for politics.Strategy and tactics do not emerge self-evidentlyout of research data which inevitably requireskilled and politically experienced interpretation.

Even with polls, then, campaigners and candi-dates operate on the basis of uncertain informa-tion about the electorate and uncertainty aboutfuture responses to particular tactics. Equally,they cannot be precisely sure which campaignevents turned elections. Typically, explanationsof election results are constructed shortly afterthe event, mainly by the elite actors, campaignparticipants and media, and not academics,because, as Ann Lewis reminds us, academicswork slowly. One or more of these verdicts will

Margaret Scammell 9

eventually become the accepted wisdom andprovide models for future campaign activities.To some extent, then, campaigners cannot helpbut be fighting the last war. The lack of certain-ty about what and how votes may be won hasimportant consequences for the political consul-tancy business. It leaves an explanatory lacunafrom which consultants, those skilled at self-promotion, may profit. One result is the rise andfall of campaigning fads. A current example is‘rapid response’ and counter-attack ads. Themodern rule that every attack must be coun-tered despite ambiguity of evidence and evenexperience (Doak, 1995), has clear commercialbenefits for consultants in advertising produc-tion. Another example is the internet, and all1996 U.S. major primary presidential candidatesused web sites, despite the absence of any evi-dence at all about its impact with voters.

This is not to say that there is not skill andlogic in political folk wisdom. There may be acase for understanding campaigning as craft,perhaps especially in pre-‘modern’ times whenthe local political boss or party agent had sub-stantial control over the whole campaignprocess, which was primarily directed at gettingout the vote. However, it is to suggest that cam-paigning wisdom emerges in particular ways,which are not theoretically-developed, nor, ascrafts often were, scientifically-based, and inwhich there is a strong element of folklore. Forinstance, there is now some social scientificsupport for consultants’ common belief that it ismore effective to attack one’s opponent than topromote one’s own program (Johnson-Cartee andCopeland, 1991:10-15; Kern and Just, 1995). Yet,there is little evidence that the trend to negativecampaigning emerged as a result of scientificknowledge (see below). It seems reasonable tohypothesize that, of its nature, political folk wis-dom is less likely than the previous sources to becapable of successful transference across bordersinto new and different campaign situations.Successful here means the more or less perma-nent inclusion in campaign plans, regardless ofits proven effectiveness with voters.

Campaigning as Warfare: Modern Folk Wisdomin Practice

Anyone who spends any length of time listen-ing to consultants or reading the trade literatureis likely to be struck by the frequency and force-fulness of military analogies. Militarymetaphors, of course, have long been commonin political campaigns and are by no means lim-

ited to the U.S.. The word ‘campaign’ itself hasa military origin. Nonetheless, there is enoughevidence to speculate that campaigning per-ceived consciously as a kind of bloodless war-fare is emerging as a distinctive approach amongU.S. consultants. I would suggest further thatcampaigning-as-warfare has developed out of ahybrid of commercial marketing ideas and polit-ical folk wisdom, with the latter more signifi-cant. True, there is a body of marketing theorywhich draws on the work of military strategists,Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Liddell-Hart among oth-ers, to explain competitive success (Saunders,1987). These same names occur occasionally inelectoral campaigning literature, Sun Tzu’s espe-cially, despite the obscurity of much of his key2,000-year-old text, The Art of War. Yet, consul-tants themselves seem to believe that war, inmany ways, offers more appropriate analogiesthan marketing. Electoral contests for the majorcandidates in the U.S. first-past-the-post systemare winner-takes-all affairs, rarely true for com-mercial products. ‘Victory’ is the goal, and mar-ket share, equivalent to percentage vote, is lessimportant than the result. Consultants perceivecampaigns as ‘duelling images,’19 in which one’sloss is another’s gain, whereas commercial com-petitors are more likely to have a commoninterest in expanding the market as a whole.The strategic concepts of offense and defense,while important in both commerce and politics,are thought fundamental to success in electoralcampaigns. According to David Wilhelm: ‘animportant part of campaigns is to put your oppo-nent on the defense. If you are defining theterms of the debate you are winning, if you areon the backfoot explaining, you are losing.’20

Again, consultants view the ‘offense imperative’as a distinguishing feature from marketing,which is more fundamentally concerned withself-promotion. The electoral environment isviewed as less stable, more unpredictable andmore treacherous than for commercial products,partly because of the tactics of opponents andpartly because of the scrutiny of a sometimeshostile media. Kotler (1981) dismissed this as amyth held by consultants who do not complete-ly understand marketing. Nonetheless, cam-paigns are relatively short and particularlyintense conflicts in which warfare-like virtuesof speed, anticipation and tactical flexibility areat a premium.

Many of the tactics employed and lauded byconsultants are explained better by the warfare,or perhaps war games, analogy than by market-ing. It is fairly common for instance, for cam-


paigns to engage in gamesmanship to mislead orconfuse opponents. Campaigns organize elabo-rate feints to throw opponents off track, forexample, by reserving air time early in a cam-paign cycle in the hope that opponents will tryto match the buy and be drawn into spendingtoo much too soon (Arterton, 1992). In the 1996primaries Bob Dole’s consultants used a varia-tion on the theme to outwit Lamar Alexander,who they believed was their most dangerousopponent. They deliberately talked up the threatfrom Pat Buchanan while at the same time orga-nizing an eleventh-hour advertising blitz againstAlexander which gave him no chance to respond(Washington Post). According to Charles Black,Lee Atwater turned the deliberate feint into anart form: ‘He would do a lot of feints and mis-leading moves to psychologically screw up theother guy, which I sometimes questioned thevalue of. He put a lot of energy into things thatprobably weren’t all that worthwhile.Occasionally one might be. But the thing withLee was that he was always working so hardthat he wasn’t giving up anything else that heshould have been doing.’21 It is near impossibleto measure the effectiveness of these tactics, afactor which in itself might render them suspi-cious to marketing theorists with their empha-sis on efficient management of resources.However, they have clear military value: decep-tion and surprise being two key principles ofsuccessful warfare for Sun Tzu (1971:53-4).

Advertising is one area where marketing/poli-tics links are not only clear but have been fun-damental to the increasing influence of market-ing in politics and to the growth of the politicalconsultancy industry. Yet even here marketingfalls short. The current U.S. predominance ofnegative advertising in politics does not seemlikely to have marketing origins. Advertisingwithin marketing theory is generally framed interms of self-promotion: branding exercises,establishing market position, supplying addedvalue to the product and so on (Crosier, 1991).In 1972 the Federal Trade Commission encour-aged advertisers to use comparative advertising,which it was argued, would furnish the con-sumer with more information and encouragecompetition. However, research estimates thatcomparative advertising comprises only about 5-10% of product ads in the U.S. (Johnson-Carteeand Copeland, 1991:19-25). Even allowing forsome increase since these estimates, this is arelatively paltry amount compared to politicalcampaigns in which, over the last 20 years, neg-ative appeals have come to dominate, up from

roughly 30-60% (Tarrance). Politicians are lessinhibited than commercial marketers, bothabout the content of the message which is rela-tively unregulated and about possible shrinkageof the overall market. In fact, some may bemore likely to win with a low turn-out(Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1996).

Negative campaigning has deep roots in poli-tics. Aggressive advertising and sometimescrude personal attacks on opponents are notinnovations of modern times and their historicaluse is well documented (Jamieson, 1984; 1992).However, consultants and observers have report-ed a change in U.S. politics. Until the mid-1970s-early 1980s the consultants’ rule ofthumb was that negative ads were not smartpolitics and should be generally reserved for acandidate in trouble (Diamond and Bates,1988:359-62; Johson-Cartee and Copeland,1991:8). As veteran consultant Doug Bailey putit: ‘Old Rule Number Three: beware using nega-tive ads; they generally are not credible and areseen as a sign of desperation.’ (Bailey, 1995) Thenew rule is that negative ads are the most effec-tive means of persuasion and are increasinglyused by candidates and challengers alike.According to Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1996:147):

Candidate after candidate has turned tonegative advertising and once the gates ofnegative campaigning are opened, they aredifficult to close. The best way to answeran attack is with another attack and jour-nalists, who thrive on political conflict,echo the negativity . . . in their ownincreasingly critical and cynical reporting.

Related to the attack ads phenomenon hasbeen the rise of opposition research as a distinctbranch of political consultancy, the fastest-grow-ing subfield in the business (Shalit, 1994). Now,this research is rather different from marketing’semphasis on polling and focus groups to identifyvoter perceptions of candidates’ and opponents’strengths and weaknesses. That type of canvas,a direct influence of marketing, is fairly routinein higher-profile U.S. races and used to deter-mine what Gary Mauser (1983) calls the ‘strate-gic positioning’ of candidates. Oppositionresearch has more combative aims: to investi-gate an opponent’s public record, backgroundand character to provide propaganda ammuni-tion for use in advertising, direct mail andspeeches, for rapid response to opponents’attacks, for release to the press, or to third par-

Margaret Scammell 11

ties (e.g., web sites, pressure groups or even non-threatening rival politicians) when it is deemedadvantageous to publish material without beingidentified as the source.22 The flip side of thesame coin, ‘vulnerability studies,‘ involve sub-jecting one’s own candidate to the same severescrutiny, sometimes employing private detec-tives for the more delicate matters. These typesof inquiries, which David Tel, research directorfor Bush/Quayle 1992, calls ‘partisan politicalscience,’23 appear closer to military intelligencethan to market research as normally understood.

The examination of campaigning-as-warfaremight be pursued down other avenues, whichcan only be mentioned here, for example: intel-ligence-gathering operations, which range fromespionage-like infiltration of an opponent’scamp to the high-tech use of voice-recognitionsoftware to locate exactly where, how much andto which audiences opponents are advertising;24

the use of ads, not just for persuasion, but as akind of psychological warfare to scare or pro-voke an opponent, an example of which mightbe the Boston Harbor spots for Bush againstDukakis (Arterton, 1992); and in advertisingmessages themselves which seek to polarizeissues into moral/emotional questions of goodand bad, and are liberal in the use of patrioticsymbolism (the flag, the pledge of allegiance),again reminiscent of war propaganda. Morebroadly, it may be that political advertisingtexts are more akin to propaganda than moderncommercial advertising, with little evidence ofthe latter’s embrace of ambivalent story-linesand messages (O’Shaughnessy, 1996).

If it is true as Kotler says, that campaigninghas always had a marketing character, thenequally it has probably always had the whiff ofwarfare. To invert Clausewitz’s famous dictum:politics is a continuation of war by any othermeans. This is not unique to the U.S., and thehistory of British campaigning offers evidence ofespionage and black propaganda (Scammell,1995:29-31) while advertising which cast oppo-nents as more or less unwitting dangers to thenation have been fairly common Conservativeappeals in both the Thatcher and Major eras.Moreover, campaigning-as-warfare may be a use-ful corrective to the view, especially common inEurope, which sees modern campaigning as thesubmission or merger of politics to businessmarketing methods (Franklin, 1995; Maarek,1995; Newman, 1994). It may be that marketinghas played a part in encouraging the warfareapproach; the marketing literature certainlyallows for that possibility. However, that is not

the weight of evidence of either the politicalconsultants’ trade literature or of interviewsconducted here. Rather, it seems that warfare (orwar games) are viewed as part of the logic of pol-itics. The important influences for the tacticsmentioned above come from campaigns them-selves, in other words political folk wisdom or‘learning by results.’ The example of LeeAtwater’s masterminding of Bush’s come-from-behind 1988 victory offered an object lesson inthe effectiveness of negative campaigning. JamesCarville’s war room for Clinton’s 1992 campaignhelped entrench as common wisdom the idea ofrapid response, rebutting opponents’ attacks asquickly as possible. These approaches are exam-ples of the new style in U.S. campaigning,which were not the conventional wisdom of 10and fewer years ago. Trade journal articles ofadvice on how to ‘nail the opposition’ (Galen,1988) and how to mount ‘great attacks’ (Cooper,1991) only began to appear with regularity inCampaigns and Elections from 1988. There issome evidence of the direct influence of mili-tary theory (Blydenburgh, 1995). Oriental strate-gy in particular, has become fashionable in U.S.politics. For example, ancient Chinese militarytheory, summarized in Harro Von Senger’s TheBook of Stratagems: Tactics for Triumph andSurvival (1991), is taught to students at theGraduate School of Political Management of theGeorge Washington University. Lee Atwater,among the most influential and controversial ofpolitical consultants, enjoyed a reputation as astudent of military history and admirer of theteachings of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli,25 anddoubtless his example rubbed off on others,including Clinton’s erstwhile Svengali, DickMorris, who claims Atwater, along withWinston Churchill, as his political heroes(Campaigns and Elections, March, 1995).However, the trade literature reviewed here con-tained no equivalent of the marketing litera-ture’s analysis of the potential usefulness of mil-itary strategy. There are some signs that mili-tary thinking is becoming a greater direct influ-ence upon consultants, as yet campaigns them-selves, political folk wisdom, appears thestrongest source.

U.S. Campaigning: Sources of Ideas

I have suggested that U.S. campaigningknowledge is more professional than elsewherealthough it continues to be dominated by folkwisdom and remains more art than science. Iwant to suggest now that this trend would be


demonstrated by a more detailed investigationof campaigners’ sources of ideas, broken downinto the various elements of campaigning undersuch headings as: can campaigns win electionsand in what circumstances; what constitutes agood campaign; who among the electorate arepersuadable and how are they persuaded? Suchan investigation is a vast undertaking andbeyond the scope of these few pages. However,by way of illustration, let us look briefly atcampaigners’ perspectives on just two aspects:what constitutes a good campaign and how arevoters persuaded.

What Constitutes a Good Campaign?One is immediately struck by the gulf

between political science and campaigners’thinking. Social science offers a wide variety ofperspectives although increasingly the focus ison normative concerns: about the quality ofcampaign discourse, the offering of clear politi-cal choices, the provision of sufficient informa-tion for voters to make rational choices, and soon (Jamieson, 1992; Mancini and Swanson,1996; Popkin, 1991). For consultants, winning isthe necessary but not quite sufficient criterionof a good campaign. The trade literature makesclear that there are degrees of difficulty in cam-paigns. Campaigns and Elections publishes anannual scorecard of consultants’ performanceswhich it weights according to incumbency, pre-vious party control, campaign competitiveness(judged by expenditure) and office visibility.Theoretically, it should be possible that somelosing campaigns could also be good ones, in thesense of over-achievement of expected possibili-ties. However, the trade literature tends over-whelmingly to review losing campaigns as casestudies of mistakes and examples of what not todo. A number of interviewees claimed that theliterature did not reflect their personal experi-ences: losing campaigns created the more lastingmemories and taught more useful lessons.However, all agreed that it was extremely rarefor campaign teams in either winning or losingsituations to engage in any rigorous post-raceanalysis. Thus, by default winning has becomethe public yardstick of success. In the competi-tive world of political consultancy, managementof a losing campaign is unlikely to enhanceone’s career prospects, no matter how sharp thestrategy or disciplined the organization.

Some wins are better than others, of course.Campaigns and Elections ‘scorecard’ awards toppoints for a challenger win against an incum-bent in a high visibility race (presidential, gover-

nor or Senate), followed by a switch of partycontrol in an open race. According to scorecard,the easiest race to win is a relatively low-profilestate legislature contest against a poorly fundednon-incumbent opponent.

It is no easy matter to decipher from the liter-ature an order of priority for factors which con-tribute to success. Consultants claim the win-ning edge for almost every and any aspect ofcampaigning from strategy to the mobilizationof absentee ballots. However, Napolitan’s (1995)claim that ‘strategy is the single most importantfactor’ is probably the common wisdom. Thedefinition of strategy, ‘how you will win . . .who will vote for you and why’ (Bradshaw,1995), puts a premium on the quality of audi-ence research to identify target voters and thecampaign message, or theme. Discipline in cam-paign organization and communication, that is,concentrating resources on the targets and stay-ing resolutely ‘on message’ are other key ele-ments. Field operations and get-out-the-voteactivities, traditional aspects of campaigning theworld over, continue to feature prominently inthe trade literature.

Given that personalization is an American-style campaigning trademark, it was surprising tofind that the candidate him/herself emerges as acuriously ambivalent figure and is rarely cited ingeneral advice as the key to a good campaign.Rather, he or she is another input who bringsstrengths and weaknesses, to be exploited orovercome. Interviews with consultants offer aslightly different perspective, encapsulated inRoger Ailes’ view (1988): ‘Show me a man orwoman with a mission, and I’ll show you some-body that’s tougher to beat.’ Just as commonly,however, consultants infer that the candidate canimpede a good campaign, and all too frequentlylacks the discipline to stay on message, a bigproblem for, among others, George Bush, accord-ing to his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater.26

How are Voters Persuaded? This simple question has spawned a vast

amount of research, from social science and the-ories of voting behavior and theories of mediaeffects, to theories of persuasion drawn fromsources ranging from political philosophy tocognitive psychology. It is an immense subjectand clearly these few pages cannot do it justice.Instead, we focus here on paid advertising ontelevision, the predominant tool of persuasionin U.S. campaigns.

The social science orthodoxy is that advertis-ing has minimal effects upon voting behavior.


The effects research, neatly summarized byMcGuire (1986), suggests that at most advertis-ing has only ‘slight’ effects which are noticeablemainly among late deciders and for obscure can-didates and in minor races. Psychology laborato-ry and field experiments confirm that ads aremost effective when recipients have little per-sonal concern (low involvement) about the out-come of the race, for example, primaries or con-tests for state and local offices (Johnson-Carteeand Copeland, 1991:53). Consultants, unsurpris-ingly, argue that advertising does work. Theybelieve it is essential to achieve name recogni-tion, especially in primary and lower orderraces, that it can alter candidate images and,crucially, that it can help set the agenda.Academics may continue to doubt the effective-ness of advertising, but ‘time and again’ consul-tants report gains in popularity and visibility forcandidates able to afford sufficient advertising(Arterton, 1992).

However, there is growing academic supportfor consultants’ belief in the effectiveness of neg-ative advertising, here defined in line withJohnson-Cartee and Copeland to include compar-ative ads (1991:17). There is, for example, evi-dence that recipients weigh negative informationmore heavily than positive; that negative infor-mation is more able to alter existing impressions;that images designed to prompt negative emo-tions are better recalled than positive ones(Jamieson, 1992: 41). Just and Kern (1995) high-light the importance of advertising rather thannews, especially negative and affectively-ladenmessages, in the construction of candidateimages. Ansolabehere and Iyengar’s experiments(1995) also concluded that negative advertisingmay significantly drive down the vote. Johnson-Cartee and Copeland, academics who double asconsultants, argue further than the most effectivenegative advertisement is the direct comparisonof candidates’ records, experience or issue posi-tions, and they warn consultants against over-reliance on emotional appeals (1991:43).

There is, then, some academic support forsome of the current wisdom of political adver-tising, but the trade literature betrays scarcelyany debt to social science. Most striking, in fact,is how little attention is paid to general ques-tions of persuasion in the pages of Campaigns andElections: just six percent of all items since 1980,compared to eight percent for electoral law, 25percent for campaign organization and 18 per-cent for analysis of specific campaigns. Some ofthese articles offer illuminating counsel into theuse of, for example, negative advertising (Doak,

1995) or the development of candidate image(Sheenan, 1988). Consultants pay homage to theinfluence of commercial advertising (Bailey,1995) but there is no real indication that politi-cal advertising is anywhere near as theoreticallydeveloped as its commercial counterpart. Thereis no equivalent, for example, of the attentionpaid in modern marketing texts to theories ofconsumer behavior and psychology (Foxall andGoldsmith, 1994).

Arterton (1992) was surprised to discover that,for all the importance attached to advertising,media consultants described their work in a lan-guage that was neither ‘very rich nor precise,’relying on a few rough categories: ‘bio-spot,’ ‘per-son-in-the-street,’ ‘comparison spots’ or ‘attackads.’ That is not to say that ads are all intuitionand political folk wisdom. A good deal ofresearch, pre- and post-testing, of variable quali-ty, goes into the creation of advertising, andincreasingly in the higher-order races, into thetracking of voter responses. However, its primepurpose is to discover what works; consultantsseem much less concerned with how it works.For example, David Beinstock, media buyer forPete Wilson’s California gubernatorial campaign,explained that ‘verbatims’ are regarded as indica-tions of effective advertising; that is, success wasjudged by whether people in the campaign’s dailyfocus groups volunteered words or phrases thatwere verbatim in the ads. It was not at all impor-tant whether the ad was actually the source.27

The same few elements recur consistentlywhen consultants talk or write about the com-ponent’s effective advertising: simplicity of themessage; emotional connection with votersthrough the message, visual imagery and sym-bolism; and repetition. ‘Great ads, like greatideas, are simple at their core. Simplicity is theroad to clarity. Simple concepts, simple images,simple words.’ (Rindy, 1995) Ads should ringtrue factually with the target audience, and beemotionally compelling. According to Bradshaw(1995), ‘in politics emotional motivation pre-vails over rational motives every time.’Consultants profess belief in the importance of‘symbolic communication,’ messages supportedby visual cues and symbols which convey emo-tional and value-laden meanings. And the mes-sage must be repeated. Staying ‘on message,’ isconsidered a vital dimension of a good cam-paign. ‘When we have said something for the10,000th time and are bored to tears, somebodyelse is hearing the message for the first time,’according to David Wilhelm.28 However, someconsultants argue that repetition is increasingly


difficult to sustain on television without risk ofboring or irritating viewers. According to DougBailey (1995), perceptive consultants have fol-lowed commercial advertisers in recognizing thedwindling shelf-life of any one particular ad.Nonetheless, modern wisdom, money permit-ting, is to buy enough ratings points until onecan be reasonably sure that the target audiencehas been exposed to an advertisement for atleast 2-10 times.29

The lessons of simplicity, emotional connec-tivity and repetition stem from conceptions ofvoters as generally uninformed and uninterestedin politics. To the extent that the target audi-ence is the uncommitted independents, thisview echoes in exaggerated form the findings ofacademic research that the non-partisans tend tobe less attentive and informed than partisans.The model of the audience and how it is per-suaded is strongly reminiscent of the inter-warpropaganda theories. As Arterton observes(1992) consultants perceive their audience as acollectivity, as a mass audience. By contrast,modern theories of persuasion, rooted in cogni-tive psychology, concentrate on individualresponses to communications stimuli. Artertonfurther suggests that, strictly speaking, mostpolitical advertising is not persuasion at all, inthe sense of providing information to develop anargument with the aim of changing attitudes.Campaigners ‘do not feel that, in the midst of acampaign, they have the capacity to reshapesubstantially voters’ beliefs and attitudes.’Instead ads are intended primarily to set theagenda, to steer the audience towards issues andconcerns where the candidate is most in tunewith public sympathies, as judged by opinionpolls. Setting the agenda is less about winningarguments and more with restricting public dis-cussion to a limited range of issues that favorthe candidate and least favor his or her oppo-nent. This characterization rings true, althoughmuch advertising could be described as propa-ganda, as defined by O’Shaughnessy (1996), withan emphasis on re-enforcement of already-heldviews, rather than attitude change. Consultantsthemselves, however, seem to believe they arein the business of persuasion, more looselydefined, for example: persuading people to turnout to vote, convincing voters that their candi-date is more trustworthy and competent thanthe opponent. However, this point leads toanother contribution of marketing, the ‘market-ing concept’, in which the customer is put at‘the beginning rather than the end of produc-tion-consumption cycle’ (Baker, 1991). Broadly,

the easiest product to sell is one that the con-sumer wants, and product development shouldbe conducted accordingly. Translated into poli-tics, the task is to tailor the candidate accordingto public opinion, not the other way round.

In practice it is often thought easier todemonstrate that an opponent is not what vot-ers want than to persuade them that s/he is,especially in a climate of cynicism about publicofficials. Consultants cite Watergate as the piv-otal event which made negative ads work (Doak,1995; Weiner, 1976), although there are addi-tional strategic advantages of attack rather thanself-promotion, most importantly, when it isnecessary to court the centre ground withoutalienating strong partisans. There is some dis-pute among consultants concerning the mosteffective focus of attack, issues or candidatequalities. For Mark Goodin, who ran OllieNorth’s Virginia Senate contest, issues do notwork, ‘people don’t connect with them’ at anemotional level.’30 For Charles Black the empha-sis on personality or issues ‘varies from race torace but issues do matter because they are vehi-cles for defining the candidate and creating thecandidate’s image.’31 Doak (1995) argues theconventional wisdom is changing towards issuesand comparison rather than purely attack ads.People have become cynical about negativeadvertising and dislike personal attacks: ‘Inmodern campaigns, negative ads are increasinglyabout issues.’ However, the post-1988 upsurgeof media criticism and ‘fact check’ columns hashad a double-edged effect on consultants’ think-ing, encouraging them to be more careful beforegoing negative but also supplying new ammuni-tion for the counter-attack ad, courtesy of thepress. The public criticism does not seem tohave stemmed the negative tide, according toearly verdicts from the 1996 races (Peters, 1996).

Conclusion

It is widely accepted that ‘professionalization’is the hallmark of modern campaigning and theU.S., the world’s most professional campaigners.Yet, this investigation found that professional-ization is problematic in the U.S. There aresome emerging signs: the growth of a commonidentity, specialist knowledge, efforts to estab-lish specialist education and training, and evento develop a common code of ethics. In theserespects the U.S. is further down the profession-al road than the rest of the democratic world.However, as yet, U.S. political consultancy is


characterized more by commercialism than pro-fessionalism. It is less the professional paradigmand more the commercial paradigm. In higher-profile races, the traditional party campaign man-agement has been largely displaced by full-timeconsultants offering an ever-wider range of techni-cal and other specialisms. Political consultancy isa prospering business. Yet, it falls short of themark of professionalism in two crucial respects: aself-policing ethical code and in the professional-ization of campaigning knowledge. The examina-tion of the ‘how to’ literature found campaigningto be largely undeveloped in any theoretical senseand the sources of campaigners’ ideas dominatedby political folk wisdom. There is little evidenceof any overt influence of social science in thecampaign war room. Despite the mass of socialscientific research into elections and voter behav-ior, U.S. consultants seem relatively uninfluencedby academic labors. A number of authors (e.g.,Arterton, 1992; Thurber, 1995) note that consul-tants frequently complain about academic irrele-vance while simultaneously being unwilling tostudy the literature. The most significant singlesource of ideas continues to come from withincampaigns themselves. Experience, one’s own andthe experience of others as reflected in commonfolk wisdom, remain the predominant influences.Lessons from commercial marketing also emergeas a force in campaigners’ thinking, particularly instrategic planning, in the increasing reliance uponmarket research methods and in the managementof resources. The marketing influence is clear,although interviews suggested that campaignersdo not believe that the marketing approach isentirely appropriate for the special circumstancesof electoral combat. It can assist but not replacethe skills and experience necessary for success inthe warfare-like conditions of political battle.

The point is not merely to suggest that studiesof comparative campaigning have over-estimatedthe degree of professionalism in modern cam-paigning, but to argue that there are consequencesfor ‘Americanization.’ We suggested that politicalfolk wisdom would be less likely to travel wellabroad than the more ‘scientific’ and theoreticallydeveloped aspects of campaigning. Of its nature,folk wisdom develops from experience and learn-ing by results and is thus tied to specific cam-paign circumstances and environments in a waythat social science and marketing theory are not.

Generally, then, this investigation supports theprevailing academic consensus which emphasizesthe limits of American influence on overseascampaigns. The usefulness of American cam-paign knowledge is restricted precisely because it

is U.S.-specific wisdom, and largely undevelopedon a wider theoretical plane. American-stylemethods are likely to be most fully incorporatedinto foreign electioneering in those countrieswhere electoral conditions are most similar tothe U.S. This again is the consensus view ofresearch into comparative electioneering. Thedegree of convergence around American-stylecampaigning is largely dependent on a number ofcontextual factors (Swanson and Mancini, 1996;Farrell, 1996): the electoral system and structureof party competition (e.g., presidentialism asopposed to parliamentary systems, candidate-cen-tered or party-centered campaigning; two-party ormulti-party systems, first-past-the-post or propor-tional representation); the structure of regulation(campaign finance and obligations and restric-tions on media and paid advertising); the struc-ture of the media (the penetration of televisioninto the home market, the development of satel-lite and cable television, media competition andforms of ownership); the development of informa-tion technology; and the strengths and distinc-tiveness of national political cultures.

There are considerable structural constraintson the wholesale import of American methods,to which should be added the knowledge-baseitself of U.S. campaigning. Equally, however, theexamination of the source of campaigners’ ideascan help us identify more precisely those U.S.practices which might be successfully importedand adapted elsewhere. There are a number ofpractices, incorporated into the general U.S. polit-ical folk wisdom, which nonetheless rely on abody of broader theory and/or have been giventhe stamp of credence by academic research.Most of these come from marketing: the impor-tance of strategy, identifying target voters and ofconcentrating campaigning resources on thosetargets. Correspondingly, market researchbecomes increasingly significant, to establish thetarget market and the ‘positioning’ of the candi-date/party in relation both to the targets and theopponents. Marketing theory translated for poli-tics encourages two dominant aspects of U.S.campaign communication which now increasing-ly feature abroad: messages disciplined tightly ona narrow range of themes and issues which mar-ket research suggests appeal to the target audi-ence; and communication designed less for per-suasion and more for driving the agenda towardsissues which favor one party and disfavor oppo-nents. One might expect also lessons of U.S.political advertising will also will be adoptedelsewhere. First, that advertising matters; there isenough scientific evidence now to support the


folk wisdom that ads are an important source ofvoter information. Second, that judicious repeti-tion does increase the prospects of voter influ-ence (Just et al., 1996). Third, that negative adver-tising is the most effective. The type and style ofthe most potent negative advertising (emotional-ly-laden appeals versus cooler styles, characterattacks or issue comparisons) is in dispute,although the trend to issue comparisons favoredby some consultants has been lent social scientif-ic weight. In short, the marketing approach, strat-egy and research tools, and the reliance on adver-tising, especially negative advertising, are fea-tures which promise to flourish abroad, evenwhere structural conditions are vastly differentfrom the U.S. Britain, for example, with its strongparty and parliamentary system, tightly regulatedmedia and ban on paid TV political advertising, isoften considered resistant to American methods(Blumler et al., 1996). Yet the last two electionshave demonstrated clear evidence of the market-ing approach to strategy and communication, andfor the Conservatives, especially, of increasingfaith in the value of advertising and negativeappeals (Scammell and Semetko, 1995).

Campaigning-as-warfare was offered as adescription of much modern U.S. electioneering.It was characterized as predominantly folk wis-dom, yet there is a logic to it and an intellectualattraction of the war games aspects which mightappeal to campaigners abroad. The apparent effec-tiveness of negative advertising might alsoenhance its charms. However, many of its fea-tures, the deliberate feint, intelligence-gathering,the emphasis on opposition research have littleindependent evidence of effectiveness and areclearly less appropriate in countries with strongparliamentary systems where opposing leadersand party programs and images are well-knownand formed long before the campaign. It is notclear whether campaigning-as-warfare is anymore than a temporary fashion, boosted by themythic appeal of the metaphor and by the appar-ent success of negative campaigning. However,there is a fund of military strategic thinking todraw from and signs that campaigners areincreasingly interested in it. It is possible that theliterature of warfare could become, much as mar-keting, an important and continuing theoreticalsource of campaigning ideas.

These examples, the marketing approach, adver-tising and campaigning-as-warfare, are by nomeans a definitive list of the possibilities ofAmerican influence, whether by export or by rolemodel. However, they are intended to illustratethe value of an approach which stresses the impor-

tance of understanding campaigners’ thinking.This does not replace, but it does supplement theexisting comparative research emphasis on themanifestly observable features of campaigns, thewhat rather than the why. It can offer us moreprecise clues to the direction of modern cam-paigning, and fresh insight into its commonly-agreed key characteristics: ‘professionalization,’‘personalization,’ increasing importance of imageand TV presentation and so on. It can help us sep-arate more clearly changes in campaigningprocesses from effects of media change. Swansonand Mancini (1996), for example, are unusuallycareful in their use of the term ‘professionalism,’but less so about ‘personalization’ which theyidentify as the ‘centre-piece’ of modern campaigns(p. 251). Setting aside qualms at the modernism ofpersonality-led campaigns, there is a potentiallyconfusing conflation here of TV reporting andcampaigners’ strategies. My reading of the tradeliterature finds personality emerging in surprising-ly ambiguous ways. In fact, it may even be thatthe more ‘professional’ the campaign, the morelikely that emphasis on leader/ candidate qualitieswill be variable from race to race, depending oncampaigners’ assessments of the electoral market.

Finally, a word of caution. One should be care-ful not to assume that campaigners’ ideas, asreflected in the literature, are played out smoothlyin practice. Even in the U.S. (and certainly inBritain) consultants commonly gripe that politi-cians refuse to heed their advice (Faucheux, 1996).Moreover, this article cannot claim to be morethan an introductory survey, based on a relativelysmall and necessarily selective sample of vast ter-ritory, and it raises a number of questions whichgo well beyond its turf. The other side of theequation, the ways in which foreign campaignerschoose to interpret, adapt or ignore U.S. example,is clearly an area for investigation. So too is theway that campaigning knowledge is developedelsewhere. One might imagine, for example, thatwinning might be a less dominant yardstick ofsuccess in multi-party and proportional represen-tation systems. Stronger party systems may alsofoster greater continuity of campaign staff acrosselections and encourage, as in Britain, fairly inten-sive private campaign post-mortems which feedinto campaign wisdom in slightly different waysthan in the more ad hoc campaign arrangementsof the U.S. One might expect too that campaignethics will develop differently across cultures andparty systems, especially where campaign man-agers can be held more or less directly to accountby party members.


1. A total of 25 consultants were questioned inconnection with this project.

2. Ron Faucheux, interview, 8 May 1996.

3. Campaigns and Elections lists 22 major cate-gories and 67 sub-categories of consultants in its‘Complete Guide to Political Products andServices.’ February, 1990 10:4.

4. Interview with Christopher Arterton, Deanof the Graduate School of Political Management ofthe George Washington University, 7 May, 1996.

5. Mark Goodin, ‘Communicating from theCampaign War Room to the White House,’Seminar, JFK School of Government, 20 February,1996.

6. Chris Arterton, interview, 7 May, 1996.

7. Dan Carol, ‘Art of Political Research’ semi-nar, JFK School of Government, 12 March, 1996.

8. Charles Black, interview, 9 May, 1996.

9. Chris Arterton, interview, op cit.

10. Paid political advertising is on the increaseon European television. Countries which nowallow it include Austria, Germany, Italy andSweden.

11. Jacques Segeula from France has advisedAustrian and Swedish Social Democrats; theSaatchi brothers from Britain, riding on thestrength of four successful campaigns for theConservatives, have advised Danish, Dutch andIrish conservatives and have had some involve-ment in Latin America. Interestingly, there is nowan association of professional political consultantsin Britain, but their membership is almost entirelycomposed of lobbyists, not election campaigners.

12. The point, which has not been expresslyresearched in this form, is nevertheless clear fromstudies of British election campaigning (Kavanagh,1995; Scammell, 1995).

13. Interview with Ann Lewis, 5 May, 1996.

14. Charles Black, interview, op cit.

15. Interview with Faucheux, op cit.

16. Articles in Campaigns and Elections from1980-April 1996 (excluding 1994) were analyzedby: headlines, by descriptions of contents and byanalysis of all articles geared primarily to generallessons of campaigns, as opposed to the details of

individual campaigns. A total of 1,107 itemswere categorized according to the followingmain subjects: persuasion 6%; electoral law 8%;money and fund-raising 4%; campaign organiza-tion 25%; specific campaigns 18%; other 39%.The rather large ‘other’ category includes allnews items, personal profiles, reviews, specialreports on issues, countries, regions, demograph-ic groups and historical articles.

17. Peter Hart, seminar, 26 February, 1996.

18. Interview with Leslie Goodman, DeputyCommunications Director Bush/Quayle 1992,20 February, 1996.

19. Faucheux, op cit.

20. David Wilhelm, political campaigns semi-nar, JFK School of Government, 20 March, 1996.

21. Black, op cit.

22. Dan Carol, research director for theDemocratic National Committee, 1992, andDavid Tel, director research, Bush/Quayle, 1992,Seminar ‘The Art of Political Research,’ JFKSchool of Government, 12 March, 1996.

23. Seminar, JFK School. Ibid.

24. Larry Thomas, media consultant forCalifornia Governor Pete Wilson, 1994,explained that with the use of a computerencoder and voice recognition software it waspossible to record and then focus group testevery advertisement aired on behalf of theDemocratic opponent Kathleen Brown. Seminar‘California: A case study in message discipline,’JFK School of Government, 19 March, 1996.

25. Leslie Goodman, op cit.

26. Marlin Fitzwater, 5 March, 1996.

27. David Beinstock, 19 March, 1996.

28. Wilhelm, op cit.

29. A gross ratings point refers to that percent-age of the viewers within a particular marketreached by a program, determined by the audi-ence ratings systems of A.C. Nielsen orArbitron (see Arterton, 1992).

30. Goodin, op cit.

31. Black, op cit.


Endnotes


Ailes, R. (1988) ‘The Power of the Tube’ Campaigns and Elections. 9(1).

Ansolabehere, S. and S. Iyengar (1995) Going Negative. New York: The Free Press.

Angell, A., M. D’Alva Kinzo and D. Urbaneja (1992) ‘Latin America’ in Butler and Ranney (eds)Electioneering: A Comparative Study in Continuity and Change.

Association of American Political Consultants (1996) ‘Our Profession.’ Washington, DC: AAPC.

Arterton, Christopher (1992) ‘The Persuasive Art in Politics: The Role of Paid Advertising inPresidential Campaigns’ in Matthew McCubbins ed Under the Watchful Eye: ManagingPresidential Campaigns in the Television Era. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press.

Bailey, D. (1995) ‘Effective Use of TV’ in R. Faucheux (ed) The Road to Victory. Dubuque, IA:Kendall/Hunt.

Baker, M. J. (1991) ‘One more time - what is marketing?’ in M.J.Baker (ed) The Marketing Book.Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann 2nd Ed.

Bennett, W.L. (1992) The Governing Crisis: Media, money and marketing in American Elections. NewYork: St. Martins.

Bernays, E. (1923) Public Opinion.

Bowler, S., and D. Farrell (eds) (1992) Electoral Strategies and Political Marketing. Basingstoke:Macmillan.

Blumenthal, S. (1982) The Permanent Campaign. New York: Touchstone Books.

Blumler, J.G., D. Kavanagh and T. Nossiter (1996) ‘Modern Communications versus TraditionalPolitics in Britain: Unstable Marriage of Convenience’ in D. Swanson and P. Mancini (eds)Politics, Media and Modern Democracy. New York: Praeger.

Blumler, Jay, G., Jack McLeod and Karl E. Rosengren (eds) (1992) Comparatively Speaking:Communication and Culture Across Space and Time. London: Sage.

Blydenburgh, J.C. (1995) ‘Linear Programming for Campaigns’ in Faucheux (ed) The Road to Victory.

Bradshaw, J. (1995) ‘Who will vote for you and why’ in A. Thurber and C. Nelson (eds) Campaigns andElections American Style.

Broddason, T. (1994) ‘The Sacred Side of Professional Journalism’ European Journal ofCommunication. 9:227-48.

Bruce, B. (1992) Images of Power. London: Kogan Page.

Campbell, A. Converse, P.E., Miller, W.E. and Stokes, D.E. (1960) The American Voter.

Collins, N. and P. Butler (1996) ‘Positioning Political Parties: A Market Analysis’ HarvardInternational Journal of Press/Politics. 1(2):63-77.

Crosier, K. (1991) ‘Promotion’ in M.J. Baker (ed) The Marketing Book, 2nd ed. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Diamond, E. and S. Bates (1988) The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

References

Devlin, Patrick Political Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. New Brunswick, NJ: TransactionInc, 1987.

Doak, D. ‘Attack Ads: Rethinking the Rules’ Campaigns and Elections, 16(7):20:1.

Faucheux, R. (ed) (1995) The Road to Victory: The Complete Guide to Winning in Politics.Washington, DC: Campaigns and Elections.

Faucheux, R. (1996) ‘Consultants on Trial’ Campaigns and Elections. Oct/Nov.

Farrell, D., ‘Campaign Strategies and Tactics’ (1996) in L. Le Duc, R.G. Niemi and P. NorrisComparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Foxall, G.R. and R.E. Goldsmith (1994) Consumer Psychology for Marketing. London: Routledge.

Franklin, B (1995) Packaging Politics. Edward Arnold.

Gitlin, Todd (1991) ‘Bites and blips: chunk news, savvy talk and the bifurcation of American politics’in P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks. Communication and Citizenship. London: Routledge.

Guber, Susan (1988) How to Win Your First Election: The Candidates Handbook. Miami: PickeringPress.

Gurevitch, M and J.G. Blumler (1990) ‘Comparative research: extending the frontier’ in D. Swansonand D. Nimmon (eds) New Directions in Political Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Guzetta, S.J. (1981) The Campaign Manual: A definitive study of the modern campaign process.Alexandria, VA: Campaign Publishing Co.

Habermas, J. (1989) The Strategic Transformation of the Public Sphere. Oxford: Polity Press.

Hiebert, R., R. Jones, J. d’Arc Lorenz, E. Lotito (eds) (1975) The Political Image Merchants: Strategiesfor the Seventies. Washington, DC: Acropolis Books.

Hershey, Marjorie Randon (1984) Running for Office: The Political Education of Campaigners.Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.

Jackson, J.A. (1970) Professions and Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jamieson, K.H. (1984) Packaging the Presidency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jamieson, K.H. (1992) Dirty Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johnson-Cartee and Gary A. Copeland Negative Political Advertising: Coming of Age. NJ: LawrenceErlbaum, 1991.

Just, M.R., A. Crigler, D. Alger, T. Cook, M. Kern and D. West (1996) Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidatesand the media in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kavanagh, D. (1995) Election Campaigning: The New Marketing of Politics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kern, M. and Just, M. (1995) ‘The Focus Group Method, Political Advertising, Campaign News andthe Construction of Candidate Images’ Political Communication, 12:127-145.

Kernan, H. (1994) ‘The Search for the Centre: Pivot Parties in Western European Party Systems’ WestEuropean Politics. 17(4): 124-48.

Kirchheimer, O. (1966) ‘The Transformation of Western Party Systems’ in J. La Palombara and M.Weiner (eds) Political Parties and Political Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.



Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Richard I Hofferbert and Ian Budge Parties, Policies and Democracy.Westview Press: Boulder, CO, 1994.

Kotler, P. (1981) ‘Business Marketing for Political Candidates’ Campaigns and Elections, 2(2):24-33.

Luntz, Frank (1991) ‘Preparing Your Campaign Playbook’ Campaigns and Elections, July 12:40-6.

Luntz, F. (1988) Candidates, Consultants and Campaigns. Oxford: Blackwell.

McCubbins, Matthew Under the Watchful Eye: Managing Presidential Campaigns in the TelevisionEra. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1992.

McGuire, W.J. (1986) ‘The Myth of Massive Media Impact: Salvagings and Savagings’ PublicCommunication and Behavior, 1:173-257.

Maarek, Philippe (1995) Political Marketing and Communication, London: John Libbey.

Mauser, G.A. (1983) Political Marketing. New York: Praeger.

Meyer, Chris (1990) ‘Ten Years in the Making’ Campaigns and Elections, April-May.

Napolitan, Joe (1972) The Election Game and How to Win It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Negrine, R. (1996) The Communication of Politics. London: Sage.

Negrine, R. and S. Papathanassopoulos (1996) ‘The Americanization of Political Communication:A Critique.’ Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 1(2): 45-62.

Newman. B.I. (1992) The Marketing of the President. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Nimmo, Dan and Robert L. Savage (1976) Candidates and the Images: Concepts, Methods andFindings. Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear.

O’Shaughnessy, N. (1990) The Phenomenon of Political Marketing. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

O’Shaughnessy, N. (1996) ‘Social propaganda and social marketing: a critical difference?’ EuropeanJournal of Marketing, 30(10/11):62-75.

Peters, N. (1996) ‘Did Dole and Clinton go too negative for American voters?’ Campaign. 8 November1996.

Polsby, N. and A. Wildavsky (1996) Presidential Elections. New Jersey: Chatham House.

Popkin, S. (1991) The Reasoning Voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Porter, M.E. (1980) Competitive Strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors. NewYork: Free Press.

Reed, S. F. (1980) ‘Introduction to the Inaugural Issue’ Campaigns and Elections, 1(1).

Rindy, D. (1995) ‘Focusing Your TV Commercials’ in R. Faucheux (ed) The Road to Victory. Dubuque,IA: Kendall/Hunt.

Rustin, M. (1996) ‘The Clintoning of New Labour’ The Guardian.

Sabato, L. (1981) The Rise of Political Consultants. New York: Basic Books.

Saunders, J. (1991) ‘Marketing and Competitive Success’ in M. J. Baker. (ed) The Marketing Book.

Scammell, M. (1995) Designer Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan.


Segal, D. (1996) ‘By the Numbers: Polling Firms Increasingly Turn to Business, Foreign Clients toSupplement Political Work’ Washington Post 4 March 1996

Shadegg, G. (1986) The New How to Win an Election. New York: Taplinger.

Shallit, R. (1994) ‘The Oppo Boom’ New Republic 3 January 1994

Sheenan, M. (1988) ‘The Remaking of the Candidate’ Campaigns and Elections 9(1):27-30.

Short, C. (1996) ‘Interview’ New Statesman 9 August 1996

Sproule, J.M. (1989) ‘Social Responses to Twentieth-Century Propaganda’ in Ted Smith III Propaganda.New York: Praeger.

Steinberg, A. (1976) Political Campaign Management: A Systems Approach. Lexington, MA: D.C.Heath.

Sun Tzu (1971) The Art of War (translated by S. Griffith). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Swanson, D. and P. Mancini (1996) ‘Patterns of Electoral Campaigning and their Consequences’ inMancini and Swanson (eds) Politics, Media and Democracy. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Tarrance (1982) Negative Campaigns and Negative Votes. Washington, DC: Free Congress Researchand Education Foundation.

Thurber, J. and C. Nelson (1995) Campaigns and Elections American Style. San Francisco: WestviewPress.

Tucker, L. and D. Heller (1987) ‘Putting Ethics in Practice’ Campaigns and Elections. vol 7:6.

Vollmer, H. and D. Mills (1966) Professionalization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Wattenberg, M.J. (1992) The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Webb, P. (1992) ‘Britain: The 1987 Campaign’ in Bowler and Farrell (eds.) Electoral Strategies andPolitical Marketing. London: Macmillan.

Weiner, S.L. (1976) ‘The Role of the Political Consultant’ in R. Agranoff The New Style in ElectionCampaigns. Boston: Holbrook.

West (1989) ‘America’s Latest Export: Political Consultants’ Campaigns and Elections. 10(1):15-20.

Womack, Jame P., Daniel P. Jones and Daniel Roos (1988) The Candidates Handbook. Miami:Pickering Press.

Woo, L.C. (1980) The Campaign Organizer. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Wring, D. (1995) ‘Political Marketing and Intra-Party Power: Perspectives on Labour ‘Old’ and ‘New’in Conference Proceedings: Political Marketing: Evolving Science or Maturing Art. NJ:O’Shaughnessy and Stephan Henneberg, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Institute ofManagement Studies.

The Joan Shorenstein Centeron the Press, Politics and Public PolicyJohn F. Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University79 John F. Kennedy Street

Cambridge, MA 02138Telephone (617) 495-8269 Fax: (617) 495-8696

Internet: http//ksgwww.harvard.edu/~presspol/home.htm

Documents

The Wisdom of the War Room