Robin Kolodny

Parties and Campaign Professionals in a Digital Age Political Consultants in the United States and Their Counterparts Overseas

This article assesses the role of campaign professionals in election campaigns in the Digital Age, with particular reference to their relationship with political parties. In the first section, the authors develop a typology of political consultants and assess the role they play in U.S. elections. This review of the evidence suggests a healthier relationship than has previously been assumed between U.S. parties and consultants. The second section examines comparative trends in Western Europe—which has seen some significant adaptation by the established parties—as well as in new democracies generally. In both cases campaign professionals have become increasingly prominent, indicating a convergence on the U.S. campaign model. Overall, the evidence supports the thesis that election campaigns have outgrown the institutional limitations of political parties, requiring a role for campaign professionals to fill this increasing gap.

Political Party Adaptation in US Congressional Campaigns Why Political Parties Use Coordinated Expenditures to Hire Political Consultants

We argue that political parties in the US have consciously opted to employ political consultants for their candidates’ needs in order to help cultivate competitive national elections. Thus, consultant use by political parties does not signal party decline, but party adaptation. Further, the use of political consultants by the political parties is so complete that consultants can be considered employees of the political parties; not in the traditional sense of individuals on the payroll, but in the modern corporate sense of independent contractors who are hired to complete a defined project. We investigate how national political party committees spend the money they have allocated for individual candidates in congressional races using data from the 1998 and 2000 election cycles. We examine Federal Election Commission (FEC) records of payments political parties make via coordinated expenditures.

Political Consultants and the Extension of Party Goals

Political consultants are seen as influential actors in American politics who may effect policy long after their service on an election has concluded. Many observers of the consulting industry (see, for example, Shea 1996; Sabato 1981) have suggested that the use of political consultants has been especially bad for political parties, contributing to their decline. Proponents of the party decline thesis maintain that consultants weaken parties by giving candidates independent support bases for conducting their campaigns, creating a campaign climate where individual candidates take the voting publics focus away from party platforms. But consultants have become prominent because the parties cannot always offer up-to-date technical services and close attention to local situations. Some political scientists suggest that political consultants can assist parties in attaining their goals by providing the highly professional and technical services to party candidates that party organizations themselves cannot (Luntz 1988). Further, political consultants tend to work in concert with political parties because they depend on the parties for a supply of clients (Sabato 1981; Luntz 1988). Here we explore another dimension of the consultant-political party relationship: the role political parties play in training political consultants. We hypothesize that contemporary political consultants are likely to have had close links (such as prior employment) with a political party since the 1970s, when parties began adopting new technologies and training their employees to use them. Consultant background vis-a-vis political parties can lead to two very different notions of the effect of consultant activity on our politics.

The Presidentialization of Party Leadership? Evaluating Party Leadership and Party Government in the Democratic World

In this chapter, we seek to assess the nature of contemporary party leadership across the democratic world. We start by reviewing a number of well-known models of party organization with particular reference to the implications they carry for the relative power of leaders over their parties, noting the very definite tendency of more recent models to emphasize leadership autonomy. We then proceed to examine the clearest assertion of the view that party leaders have generally become more autonomous of their parties, which is the ‘presidentialization’ argument proposed by Poguntke, Webb, and colleagues (Poguntke and Webb 2005a). This entails a recap of the original argument, along with a review of recent additions to the literature and evidence that bear upon the thesis. We conclude by discussing the implications of this argument for the party government model of representative democracy.

Party-Orchestrated Activities for Legislative Party Goals Campaigns for Majorities in the US House of Representatives in the 1990s

Recent efforts by the congressional campaign committees (CCCs), the party organizations charged with electing candidates to the US House of Representatives, have been unusually proactive in pursuing House majorities. The CCCs convinced other party-related actors, such as the national committees, political action committees (PACs) and members of Congress, to help achieve majorities in the House. These party-orchestrated activities are notable for their focus on the legislative partys goals, rather than on the partys presidential candidate. The cooperative efforts of the CCCs with their respective national committees, their attempts to induce cooperation from the PAC community, and their outreach for assistance from their own office-holders are explored. These initiatives in the 1990s reflect a significant shift in tactics. They are a reaction to changes in the level of electoral competition, concurrent with the presence of party entrepreneurs who convinced other political actors to view the partys House electoral success as consistent with their own goals.

The Several Elections of 1824

In recent years, political pundits across America were excited by the prospect that Ross Perots presidential candidacies could prompt a rare event in U.S. presidential elections: the lack of an electoral college majority by any of the three major presidential candidates. Searching for a historical precedent, observers recalled the election of 1824, as this was the last U.S. presidential election decided by the House of Representatives rather than the Electoral College (which failed to produce a majority winner). The standard interpretation of the 1824 elections resurfaced – that it was personality, not issues, that mattered most and that the election was stolen from the popular vote winner. Here, a different interpretation of the 1824 election is offered, one which has implications for contemporary campaigns as well. The 1824 election was fought over issues that were regionally, not nationally, defined and was unique for the presence of four viable candidates. Consequently, a House election is only likel...

The Effect of Grassroots Campaigning on Issue Preferences and Issue Salience

Abstract What effect, if any, do personally delivered campaign messages have on political attitudes? Recent evidence suggests that these messages can affect voting behavior, but not issue opinions (Arceneaux, 2007). We extend this work by considering the effect of electioneering on opinions about contested position issues, and whether the delivery method of the message matters. Drawing on a large scale randomized field experiment, we show that personally delivered campaign messages can influence people’s issue attitudes and issue importance on emerging issues. Furthermore, we find that people are able to resist persuasive messages that are inconsistent with their value preferences.

THE NEW NORMAL: PARTISAN VOLATILITY AND THE US MIDTERM ELECTIONS OF 2010

The 2010 midterm elections in the United States were held on 2 November, as stipulated by the US Constitution. In an effort to separate the legislative and executive branches from each other, the Constitution requires fixed election terms for the President and the bicameral Congress. The upper legislative house, the Senate, serves a term of six years. As Senators were originally indirectly elected (appointed by state legislatures), the founders thought they would be more reasoned legislators and did not wish to overturn the entire chamber in one election. Therefore, only one third of the US Senate is elected every two years. The commencement of the six year term is staggered by ‘class’ to allow this. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, was designed to be closest to the people. Therefore, Representatives serve two-year terms and the entire chamber is up for election every two years. The President is elected for a four-year term. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and will not stand for re-election until 2012. The elections of 2010 fell in the middle of Obama’s term, and hence are referred to as ‘midterm’ elections. While the president is not on the ballot, the conjecture is that voters will cast their ballots in the midterm elections based on their assessment of the job the incumbent president is doing. Therefore, President Obama was an important part of this election campaign. Also in 2010, 37 of the 50 states held elections for their own chief executives (known as Governors) and state legislatures. These elections were of particular importance as the officeholders now seated as a result of that election are the ones who will conduct redistricting for the federal legislature (the US House of Representatives) in advance of the 2012 elections. These newly determined districts will be in place for the next ten years, until 2022. As Congress has chosen to keep the size of the US House constant at 435 members, the population represented in each district must be adjusted after each decennial census. From 2003 to 2013, each House district contains 647,000 constituents on average. From 2013 to 2023, House districts will contain 710,000 constituents on average. This means that almost every member of the US House elected in 2010 will run in a differently configured district in 2012. Only six states will be entirely immune from redistricting as they only have sufficient population to warrant one House seat for the entire state. The remaining 44 will have their districts reconfigured for one of two reasons. First, the 24 states whose population changes will find them with the same number of districts they had in the previous decade still will have to align districts with in-state population movements to guarantee that districts are as equally populated as possible. Second, ten states found that their low population growth requires them to relinquish one or two seats while other states with high population growth will gain additional seats. These states will have the most significant redistricting chores. In the losing states, incumbent

Divided in Victory? The Conservatives and the Republicans

Although its provenance is uncertain (being variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill), the observation that the US and the UK are two nations divided by a common language is often – perhaps too often – repeated. When it comes to politics, however, it is easy to see why. Anyone delving into conservative commentary on the challenges posed (and the opportunities presented) by the current financial and economic crisis finds plenty of transatlantic lessons being drawn. Whether the shining examples and dire warnings to which they direct our attention would recognize themselves as such is another matter. For instance, according to one American conservative (Buchanan, 2010): Before the Tea Party philosophy is ever even tested in America, it will have succeeded, or it will have failed, in Great Britain. For in David Cameron the Brits have a prime minister who can fairly be described as a Tea Party Tory. Casting aside the guidance of Lord Keynes – government-induced deficits are the right remedy for recessions – Cameron has bet his own and his party’s future on the new austerity. He is making Maggie Thatcher look like Tip O’Neill.

The USA: The 1990 Congressional Campaign

Discussions of American election campaigns focus typically on the presidency. In this chapter we focus on congressional elections. As elections to legislative chambers they are more directly comparable to the parliamentary elections that are the concern of most of the other chapters of this volume. Each presidential election involves either a sitting president or does not, a vitally important contextual variable that, due to the constitutional limitation on presidential re-election, is often known years in advance. While this is true also for individual congressional seats (except that there are no limits to congressional service with some members serving for thirty years or more), each overall congressional election involves a mix of incumbent re-election bids and open seats. In contrast to the idiosyncratic nature of presidential elections in which the personalities, policies and records of two national candidates receive massive news coverage, congressional elections are the aggregation of many races most of which receive little individual media attention. As a result, in contrast to the highly individual nature of a presidential election, an election of the Congress, in which the effects of individual candidates and constituency circumstances can be expected to ‘average out,’ has the potential to be a contest between parties rather than simply between individual candidates and so is a better venue for assessing the role of party organisations in the campaign process and, perhaps, also for assessing trends in party support.