3
linkages are necessarily new, it is unusually hard to tell supporters, swing voters and
committed opponents apart. Therefore, the impact of get-out-the-vote campaigns, even
when they are feasible at all, is uncertain: they may easily mobilize opponents as much as
supporters. Targeting isolated voters by taking position on issues may not be a panacea
either, since the calculation of vote-maximizing party positions is greatly hampered by
the presence of numerous parties with shifting ideologies and the lack of historically
cumulated experience with citizens’ preferences.
Secondly, the inevitable weakness of party loyalties in new democracies must
leave unusually great opportunities for campaign influence. For the same reason the
stakes are equally unusual. Defeat may often mean the total disappearance of a party from
electoral competition, and victory seems to be within reach for quite a few competitors.
The combination of high stakes and great uncertainty must push party leaders to make
full use of whatever tools of campaigning they can rely on – even if the use of these
techniques contradicts their own commitments to democratic ideals and/or seems risky.
Third, many post-authoritarian democracies inherited government-controlled
public television channels from the ancien régime. Incumbents’ influence over public
television is variable, just like the means via which this influence is exercised. Direct
instruction and briefing of news editors may be unusual. Yet the experience of the two
countries covered in our analysis suggests that indirect means – like the appointment of
trusted partisans to head public service media, intimidation of editors through threatened
budget cuts, and providing loyal journalists attractive career opportunities when the next
government fires them – can still assure that many journalists end up acting like party
delegates. Part of the explanation is presumably the understandable lack in many new
democracies of a culture of public service journalism, and the dominance of a ‘political
advocate’ rather than ‘watchdog’ and ‘information provider’ role definition among
journalists. The frequent result is that journalists spontaneously assure that their party
gets extensive and predominantly positive coverage in any politically relevant
communications under their control. They can often take it for granted that they will keep
or lose their job depending on the electoral success of a party - a situation not unlike that
of ordinary campaign personnel. Thus, media coverage – and probably even more
Convention