Introduction
Observers of election campaigns around the developed world share a sense that the techniques
and methods of campaigning have changed significantly in recent decades. A “new style” of
election campaign
– a campaign conducted substantially on television, guided by the findings of
market research, designed with the tools of commercial advertising, committed to the use of new
technologies 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 campaign that had relied on personal contact,
longstanding partisan loyalties, and the extensive use of volunteers. Although this broad picture
is oversimplified and in certain respects exaggerated, it captures an important general truth about
the recent development of election campaigns. The general sense that these things belong
together – that the television campaign, the consultant-driven campaign, the calculated campaign
are somehow all related – is reflected in the set of broad, essentially interchangeable labels that
have been introduced to denote the new type of election campaign: Americanization,
modernization, professionalization, televisualization, and so on.
The present paper will not seek to adjudicate one way or the other the question of
whether there is a “new style” in election campaigns – that is, a coherent, interlocking set of
approaches and techniques that imply one another, occur together, and constitute something
distinctly different from earlier campaign forms. What I want to do instead is to address an
1
A phrase coined by Agranoff (1976).
2
Although similar changes in campaign style and technique have been the subject of commentary – much of it
critical – in virtually every advanced democracy, comparative studies of the new-style election campaign remain
rare. Single-country studies, however, are available for a wide variety of countries, as for example in the
Democracy at the Polls series. Useful collections of country studies, which include a certain amount of comparative
analysis, include Butler, Penniman and Ranney 1981; Bowler and Farrell 1992a; Butler and Ranney 1992; Kaid and
Holtz-Bacha 1995; and Mancini and Swanson 1996. Also noteworthy from a comparative perspective is a body of
recent work focusing specifically on internationally-active campaign professionals and their role in the cross-
national diffusion of campaign innovations; for example, Farrell 1998, Bowler and Farrell 2000, and Plasser 2002.
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Convention