professionalization – are by no means limited to the borrowing of campaign bells and whistles
from overseas.
The transformation of election campaigning is important not only for campaigns as such,
or even for the public performance of democratic politics of which campaigning is the
centerpiece. In the course of transforming their campaign practices, political parties in Western
Europe and elsewhere have arguably become – or come closer to becoming – the sorts of
creatures political scientists working in the tradition of Anthony Downs have long posited them
to be: pursuers of floating median rather than committed partisan voters; increasingly detached
from their shrinking memberships and guided by a strategic core; reliant on new technological
and mass-media channels to communicate directly with an electorate less structured in party
terms, and less reachable with the traditional tools of party organization, than ever before. This
new campaign actor is a historical achievement, the emergent product of many individual
campaigners’ decisions and actions. We can understand its emergence without needing to
assume anything other than reasonable, self-interested action by the various actors within
campaigns and parties at any given time. But we can understand how this process has taken
place only by treating parties expressly as organizations – which they self-evidently and non-
trivially are. The postwar transformation of election campaigning, and of political parties, is an
organizational accomplishment, conceived, negotiated, and carried through by particular actors
within and outside the political-party organizations.
The central aim of my research has therefore been to characterize a process of change,
attending to its origins and consequences, but addressing most especially its internal workings
and organizational dynamics – innovation, negotiation, resistance, transformation.
Conceptualizing campaign change in terms of professionalization suits this processual focus,
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Convention