section presents and evaluates a particular instance of campaign professionalization: the
emergence and establishment of opinion research as a campaign technique in Great Britain.
The Transformation of Election Campaigning: An Overview
Observers of election campaigns are generally agreed that significant and broadly parallel
transformations in the nature of election campaigning have taken place over the past several
decades in Western Europe, in the Anglo-American democracies, and in many other parts of the
world. A “new style” of election campaign
guided by the findings of market research, designed with the tools of commercial advertising,
committed to the use of technological innovation in its quest to reach voters, and planned and
conducted under the guiding hand of specialist professionals – is viewed as having displaced, or
reduced to at most marginal significance, a more traditional form of campaigning that had relied
on personal contact, longstanding partisan loyalties, and the extensive use of volunteers.
While this broad picture is oversimplified and in certain respects exaggerated – an
emphasis on face-to-face contact, for example, appears to be making a comeback even in
television-driven US presidential campaigns
general truth that has yet to be treated with appropriate analytic and conceptual rigor by political
scientists. This deficit is especially pronounced in the area of cross-national comparative
research. The limited attention that has been paid to the phenomenon of campaign
2
This broader project of which this paper represents a part deals with Britain and Germany as its primary case
studies; the development of election campaigns in the United States is also considered.
3
This term is borrowed from Agranoff (1976).
4
The desire of both the Republican and Democratic parties to pursue an aggressive, organized “ground war” during
the 2004 presidential campaign has received considerable media attention; see for example Joyce Purnick in the New
York Times (“One-Doorbell-One-Vote Tactic Re-Emerges in Bush-Kerry Race”; April 6, 2004) and John F. Harris
and Paul Farhi in the Washington Post (“Taking the Campaign to the People, One Doorstep at a Time”; April 18,
2004, p. A1). These forms of direct contact, of course, are themselves inspired by the new campaign style in their
systematic organization and meticulous targeting.
2
Convention