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Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning

Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK, Rachel.Gibson{at}manchester.ac.uk

Andrea Römmele

The International University, Bruchsal Campus 1, DE-76646 Bruchsal, Germany, andrea.roemmele{at}i-u.de

This article develops and tests a new multidimensional index — CAMPROF — that is designed to measure and compare parties' use of professionalized campaign techniques during elections. Based on the extant literature, we identify and operationalize the essential components of this new form of campaigning to create a 30-point index that is applied to the case of the 2005 German federal election. The results show the CAMPROF Index to be: (1) successful in capturing variance in parties' engagement in professionalized campaigning, and (2) capable of producing rankings that correspond to a priori expectations about how well the parties would perform. The findings are significant in that they provide preliminary confirmation of the Index's capacity to measure the concept of professionalized campaigning as well as providing new insights into the party-level dynamics that may be driving the current wave of campaign modernization. The opportunities and challenges involved in wider application of the measure to cross-national research are discussed.

Key Words: campaigns • comparative • methodology • parties • professionalization

Party Politics, Vol. 15, No. 3, 265-293 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1354068809102245


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