aspect of election campaigning that is separable, at least in principle, from the activities carried
out by campaigns: the nature of campaign organization. In the post-World War II era, political
parties in Western Europe and elsewhere have not only embraced new campaign approaches
(from market research in the 1950s and 60s to rapid rebuttal in the 1990s) but have also changed
the organizational structure of their campaigns. Most importantly, an increasing number and
variety of campaign functions have been contracted out to firms or individuals who are neither
full-time party staff nor party elected officials: research institutes, advertising agencies, media
advisers, direct-marketing companies, and so on. The “outsourcing” of the election campaign –
the engagement of market actors to perform functions that party actors might otherwise have
performed – is an important phenomenon in the development of campaigning, but it is neither
invariant nor universal: outsourcing is not equally prevalent everywhere, it can take different
forms, and the assignment of a given function outside the party at one election does not
necessarily mean that the function will continue outside the party at future campaigns. This
paper draws on ideas from organizational economics – theories about when firms will develop
internal organization to produce particular inputs and when they will seek to purchase those
inputs on the open market – in order to develop a preliminary theory of when rational parties will
and will not choose to outsource sections of their election campaigns. The plausibility of the
proposed hypotheses will be assessed by drawing on evidence from postwar major-party
campaigns in two Western European countries – Germany and the United Kingdom – and also,
for comparison’s sake, from campaigns in the United States.
3
This paper forms part of a broader project on campaign transformation in four West European parties: the (West)
German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the British
Conservative and Labour parties. Except as specified, the concern is specifically with general election campaigns;
different considerations may sometimes obtain at the subnational level. Because the present paper is conceptual
rather than empirical in focus, its presentation of empirical data is sketchy rather than systematic – on a kind of
‘need-to-know’ basis – and the in-depth interviews that formed the primary data source for the larger project will not
be cited directly (also for the sake of brevity!).
2
Convention