leadership, internal staffers and external contractors are both agents – and, in fact, internal
staffers (with their greater experience, lesser liability to dismissal, and utility functions that reach
well beyond the profit motive) may be considerably more difficult to control. It is certainly the
case, however, that campaign planners are aware of the problems of inducing effort, ensuring
that relevant information reaches the campaign leadership, and monitoring the activities of
campaigners, and that they cope with these problems as best they can.
[5] Flexibility and loyalty
In managing the outsourced campaign, a second concern facing campaign coordinators is the
need to strike a balance between the innovation and flexibility they hope to gain from outside
contractors and their desire for loyalty, experience, and political commitment, which (it is
thought) may be stronger within the party organization. Outsourcing offers the possibility of
flexibility along several dimensions: the number of people at work on a campaign can be
expanded and contracted more easily with the election cycle; new practitioners with new ideas
and skills can be sought out as the needs or preferences of the campaign change; costs can be
more easily contained at times no campaign is imminent; and the range of specialists employed
can be shifted over time. Furthermore, there are organization-theory reasons to think that market
flexibility is more conducive to innovation and knowledge-creation than is the bureaucratic
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Which is not to say that these risks are easily avoided. For example, party leaders face an expertise dilemma in
dealing with professionals such as pollsters and advertisers (whether intra-party or extra-party): they want these
professionals to perform certain tasks, and to perform them in the way that will best serve a specified purpose
(winning), but they may not know – and, importantly, may know to a lesser degree than the pollsters and advertisers
– what the method most conducive to winning is, or, indeed, much in detail about the tasks being performed. As a
result, campaigners must leave a good deal of specific decision-making authority in the hands of those with
particular experience or expertise. (The difficulty for parties of learning whether – say – their pollster is really
conducting good polls could also be seen as a species of what Williamson calls “information impactedness,” a
condition arising from uncertainty combined with opportunistic concealment: the cost to one party of learning what
a better-informed partner already knows may be very great (1975: 14).) Furthermore, and in spite of the risks
contractors certainly do take, the decisions being made are generally much more critical to the campaign than to the
contractor (and, for that matter, more critical to the candidate or party leader than to the local branch staffer or
volunteer). These asymmetric stakes, campaign leaders fear, may produce asymmetric commitment.
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Convention