Juri Mykkänen

Modes of Professional Campaigning A Four-Country Comparison in the European Parliamentary Elections, 2009

In recent years, political parties have reacted to far-reaching transformations in their media and sociocultural environments. These changes and adaptations, often assembled under the catchword “professionalization,” become most apparent during electoral campaigns. However, the campaign professionalism of political parties has not yet been systematically “measured,” having been examined mostly in single case studies. Against this background, we present an empirical test of the party-centered theory of professionalization. Ours is a four-country comparison of the campaign structures and strategies of political parties during the most recent European parliamentary elections. Our analyses demonstrate a wide variety in professional electoral campaigning. There are differences in campaign structures that not only point to country specifics but also to the impact of the size of the parties. We also ask whether there are differences between parties owing to their position on a right–left scale. Our findings point to some general trends in electoral campaigning that seem to be typical of societies with democratic corporatist media systems. Those similarities and country-specifics should be taken into account in future empirical analyses, which might benefit from our methodological approach.

Sourcing the News: Comparing Source Use and Media Framing of the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections

The relationship between journalists and their sources has been described as an interdependent relationship where each part needs the other. For political actors, this relationship is particularly important during election campaigns, when their need to reach voters through the media is even more urgent than usual. This is particularly true with respect to European Parliamentary election campaigns, as these are often less salient and as peoples need for orientation is greater than in national elections. However, there is only limited cross-national research on the medias use of news sources and whether there are associations between the use of news sources and media framing. This holds true for research on election campaigns in general and on European Parliamentary election campaigns in particular. Against this background, this study investigates cross-national differences and similarities in the medias use of news sources in their coverage of the 2009 European Parliamentary election campaigns and the extent to which the use of news sources is associated with the medias framing of politics and the EU. The study draws upon a quantitative content analysis of the media coverage in twelve countries. Findings suggest that there are both important similarities and differences across countries with respect to the use of news sources and that there are cases when the use of news sources is related to the framing of politics and the EU.

Two Levels of Campaigning: An Empirical Test of the Party‐Centred Theory of Professionalisation

In this article, we address the problem of measuring the professionalism of political campaigns in national parliamentary and European Parliamentary elections by means of a comparative analysis. We use party-level campaign data from two fairly similar EU member states, Germany and Finland, and eight elections between 2004 and 2011. The data are used to build an index of campaign professionalism which significantly improves previous measures by giving more attention to various campaign strategies instead of focusing only on material resources. Theoretically, our analysis is based on the so-called party-centred theory of professionalism. We hypothesise that in addition to an increase in party-level campaign professionalism over time and higher levels of professionalism in campaigning in national parliamentary elections, professionalism is also positively associated with a partys size and its right-wing orientation. We find support for the time effect, party size and emphasis on national-level elections. However, contrary to our theoretical reasoning, the political left turns out to harbour the most professional parties.

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning:

Faced with some fundamental changes in the socio-cultural, political and media environment, political parties in post-industrialized democracies have started to initiate substantial transformations of both their organizational structures and communicative practices. Those innovations, described as professionalization, become most obvious during election campaigns. In recent times, the number of empirical studies measuring the degree of political parties’ campaign professionalism has grown. They have relied on a broad spectrum of indicators derived from theory which have not been tested for their validity. For the first time, we put these indicators to a ‘reality check’ by asking top-ranked party secretaries and campaign managers in 12 European countries to offer their perceptions of professional election campaigning. Furthermore, we investigate whether any differences in understanding professionalism among party campaign practitioners can be explained by macro (country) and meso (party) factors. By and large, our results confirm the validity of most indicators applied in empirical studies on campaign professionalism so far. There are some party- and country-related differences in assessing campaign professionalism too, but the influence of most factors on practitioners’ evaluations is weak. Therefore, we conclude that largely there is a far-reaching European Union-wide common understanding of professional election campaigning.

'To methodize and regulate them': William Petty's governmental science of statistics

This analysis is aimed at locating a central 17th-century transformation in the art of government. Its general intellectual context developed in a rather bifurgated conceptual space. On the one side, there was the more visible field of sovereignty, its theoretical justifications and its simultaneous devolution from absolutistic to popular structures; on the other, there was a parallel yet less conspicuous development in the areas of the functioning of political power, namely, the formation of concrete techniques of government. I shall approach this space, which is much too broad to be covered here in its entirety, through an example, the case of Sir William Petty (1623-87), an English economist, whose empirical science of government was among the major breakthroughs in explicating modem forms of governmental practice. Obviously enough, Petty is placed in the less visible side of the conceptual space of sovereignty, which is usually left in the shadow of more dominant approaches to political theory. My theme here derives from Michel Foucault’s genealogical analyses of the development of modern government.’ In part I am concerned with what Foucault referred to as the: