Introduction
Although it would be going too far (at least some of the time) to say that democratic politicians
live to campaign, they certainly campaign to live. Whichever view of politicians’ ends one
adopts – whether their aim is to gain or regain office, to exercise power, to implement favored
policies, to serve the interests of a particular social group, or to realize a conception of the
general good – campaigning is something democratic leaders must do successfully, and
regularly, if they are to be able to accomplish anything else they desire. Election campaigns are
also important on a systemic level. Campaigning is the substance of electoral competition,
which in turn is an essential element of democratic systems – even, on some views, the defining
characteristic of democracy as such.
contributes to the production of a collective good not (necessarily) pursued by any of the
competitors individually, namely the individual legitimation of the parties or candidates elevated
to office via the election and, more broadly, the legitimation and periodic re-legitimation of the
democratic regime itself.
This paper addresses a transformation in the technique and style of election campaigning
generally agreed to have taken place in recent years in democracies both old and new. Although
this transformation has been widely remarked upon in both scholarly and popular writing on
campaigns, its nature and consequences have too seldom been subjected to careful analysis,
particularly of a cross-national comparative kind. This paper presents a theoretical account of
the transformation of election campaigning and offers preliminary support for this account in the
form of a (two-party, single-country) case study. The first, theoretical section argues that this
transformation can best be understood as a process of professionalization. The second, empirical
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This is sometimes referred to as the Schumpeterian view of democracy (Schumpeter 1942).
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Convention