Global Reproduction of American Politics

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The Global Reproduction of American

Politics
GERALD SUSSMAN & LAWRENCE GALIZIO
Published online: 10 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: GERALD SUSSMAN & LAWRENCE GALIZIO (2003) The Global Reproduction of
American Politics, Political Communication, 20:3, 309-328, DOI: 10.1080/10584600390218931
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DOI: 10.1080/10584600390218931
The Global Reproduction of American Politics
GERALD SUSSMAN and LAWRENCE GALIZIO
The process of economic transnationalization and liberalization that has accelerated

in recent years has a corollary in the political sphere. One of the political areas
that has been transformed under neoliberalism is the organization and management
Downloaded by [Universite De Paris 1] at 19:54 09 September 2013
of election campaigns. Political consultants from the United States and other lead-
ing industrialized states have been hired as campaign managers or experts in elec-
tions held in Russia, Israel, Britain, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, and a
host of other countries. Part of this newly transnationalized electioneering mode
involves the employment of specialists from the commercial sector who are skilled in
the use of new communication and information/media technologies and techniques
and in modern fund-raising methods. Encouraged and supported by increasing cor-
porate financing, campaign managers have begun to standardize and make greater
media spectacles of the process of electing a nation’s political representatives, using
campaigning styles and procedures that largely originated in the United States. A
weakening of political parties and citizen activism in the formal political process
and a deemphasis on major governing issues are among the changes observed, along
with greater attention given to voter surveillance and profiling, opposition research,
focus groups and polling, symbolic manipulation, and media-oriented construction
of candidate personalities.
Keywords communications, globalization, political campaigns, political consultants,

political economy
This article examines the transformation, commodification, and transnationalization of

U.S. electoral politics, a phenomenon circumscribed by a globalizing neoliberal regime of
accumulation. Approaching the subject from a political economic perspective, the study
critiques the conventional understanding of electoral change captured in the expression
“professionalization of politics.” It proposes an alternative view that sees the professionals
This article is part of a larger book manuscript (Sussman, forthcoming). Gerald Sussman
would like to thank his hosts during a late 2001 trip to the United Kingdom, particularly Leslie
Sklair, Annabelle Sreberny, Frank Webster, and Stephen Graham, for providing the opportunity
to meet with British academics and get their perspectives on international politics and political
consulting, and Portland State University for providing a faculty development grant that helped
fund the visit. Thanks also go to Regina Lawrence and Charles Heying for comments on this
article.
Gerald Sussman is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Communications at Port-
land State University.
Lawrence Galizio is a faculty member and Forensics Director in the Department of Commu-
nication at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon. He also is a doctoral candidate in
urban studies and planning at Portland State University.
Address correspondence to Gerald Sussman, School of Urban Studies & Planning, Portland
State University, Portland, OR 97202-0751, USA. E-mail: sussmang@pdx.edu
309
310 Gerald Sussman and Lawrence Galizio
not as the primary agents but as brokers and retailers within a system in which global
economic actors, mainly the transnational corporate executive class, have largely appro-
priated the political process. The principal concern broadly focuses on the organizing
tactics of professional consultants, their uses of new information and communications
technologies in the election process, and on how both relate to the concentration of national
and transnational political and economic power. How does the current barrage of propa-
ganda about the magic of the market and laissez faire economics link to the decline of the
participatory aspects of the public sphere? What changes in the election process can be
traced to the restructuring of the global industrial order and the new technological mode
of industrial, cultural, and political production?
The article approaches these questions by examining the influence of the consult-
ants and their bag of electioneering techniques in the United States, the arsenal of com-
munications instruments they carry into election forays, both at home and abroad, and
the underlying political economic and globalizing logic that has guided these develop-
ments. There is very little work that explicitly links changes in the political process to
political economy, although there is much literature on the cooptation of politicians and
politics by big money and corporate donors—what Tip O’Neill (and originally Jesse
Unruh), former Speaker of the House and an old veteran of political life, called “the
mother’s milk of politics” (“Living on Earth,” 1997). Heavy campaign spending lifts all
boats of those directly employed by the electoral process, including the biggest ships of
state and corporate capital. The money-driven election is an effective means of insulat-
ing the two-party system from serious challenges by radical third parties. Most important
is that large scale private financing enables corporations to maintain a disproportionate
hold on political discourse and practice, putting national politicians on a full-time money
chase during their legislative lives and allowing corporate industry lobbyists and wealthy
donors highly privileged access to politicians and to legislative and administrative policy.
Before discussing the global initiatives of political consultants, we first present the
theoretical underpinnings of a critique of the pervasive “professionalization” thesis and
offer a counterthesis that professionalization is but an epiphenomenon of the transnational
political economy and postwar superpower complex in which the work of political con-
sultants, particularly those from the United States, is lodged. There is a tendency among
the professionalization thesis group to overlook or understate the global political eco-
nomic and historical forces at work. In defense of the professionalization argument, for
example, Swanson and Mancini’s assumption that “every country’s electoral practices
are a singular expression of particular national institutions, history, culture, leadership,
mythology, and the like” (Swanson & Mancini, 1996, p. 249) disregards the majority of
states where colonial and imperial rule imposed political institutions and practices that
were largely unrelated to the pre-colonial political and cultural traditions of the colo-
nized peoples. Can it be argued that the Philippine House of Representatives and Senate
or the Malawi parliament are indigenous institutions rather than legacies of colonialism?
Their reasoning—based on a Weberian understanding of professionalization, which im-
plies that the preemption of the electoral process is a reflection of the growing complex-
ity and maturation of industrial society—provides an easy segue to the conclusion that
U.S. political campaign practices are logically transferable as countries begin to “mod-
ernize” to levels approaching those of the West. It is a reading that largely ignores and
precludes a political economic interpretation, which associates the control of politics
with the defense of organized political and economic power and privilege.
As a functionalist conception, professionalization holds that as elections are con-
ducted on a more technical basis, such as with the use of voter databases, there comes
The Global Reproduction of American Politics 311
with this development a greater need for new forms of expertise, which become central
to the process. Farrell’s technocentric emphasis on “the three ’Ts’ of electioneering,
technology, technocrats and techniques” (Farrell, 1996, p. 171), stresses the methods of
conducting elections without considering how methods are embodied in and reify sys-
tems of power. To be even more alliterative and closer to reality, he might have added
treasure-trove and transnationalization. Sharing this view, Scammell (1998) sees “profes-
sionalization” as the “hallmark of modern campaigning” (p. 269), which calls for more
electioneering specialists and technical methods and greater use of voter databases and
media expertise. But as elections become more technically managed, they also become
more industrialized (process-centered)—and significantly more expensive. The “pay-to-
play” precondition for candidacy and office favors highly financed organized interests,
making natural allies of the consultants, the public opinion specialists, the media advi-
sors, the mass media, the corporate political action committees (PACs), and other friendly
governments and politicos in pursuit of common neoliberal objectives—in short, the
“political-industrial complex.”1
The major flaw and limiting effect in the professionalization thesis and Farrell’s 3T
approach is that they discourage analysis about the sources of and how power is actually
wielded in the electoral process. Discourses that press functionalist claims about estab-
lished and authoritative technique tend to be less subject to public scrutiny or treated as
controversial, such as questions about political sovereignty and political inclusion. The
focus of election analysis on political consulting techniques and its underlying “profes-
sionalization” construct steers understanding about elections to the stock-in-trade of the
professionals (the speeches, polling, TV ad placements, etc.) without questioning the
power dynamic of unrestricted corporate financing and agenda setting. At the same time,
it effectively disables challenges from critics of the system, especially from the left.
Mancini sees the demise of the political party but not its restructuring or the politi-
cal economy at work. There is no animate force, only a passive narrative, in the changes
he describes, leaving a sense of mystery about what is driving “professionalization.” He
writes:
The “digital citizen” prefigures the possibility of direct interactions among

citizens, leaders, and officials, which, bypassing the mediation of the political
parties in favor of technical skills already developed in the fields of research
and business, further undermine the parties’ role and importance. In short,
the process of professionalization has accelerated, producing effects not only
in party structures but also, as shown later, in the very functioning of democracy.
Not only the party is becoming more professionalized, but also the whole
field of politics is undergoing the same process. (Mancini, 1999, p. 236)
Elections as Symbolic Exchange

It has long been treated as axiomatic within elite circles that ordinary people cannot be
entrusted to set the social and political agenda. Edward Bernays (1947), the early master
of public relations, confidently called the elite system of social control “the engineering
of consent,” and the savvy political commentator Walter Lippmann referred to the same
as the “manufacture of consent” (Herman & Chomsky, 2002, p. 332, n. 5). Earnest
Elmo Calkins observed in his widely read Business the Civilizer (1928) that advertising
helps “civilize” people to wants they didn’t know they had (Mayhew, 1997, p. 191).
And in more recent times, Jimmy Carter’s pollster Patrick Caddell had the temerity to
claim, “We are the pre-selectors. We determine who shall run for office” (Clark, 1996,
p. 869).
In modern elections, we agree that professional and unelected political consultants
have displaced to a great extent the engagement of political parties. We add that party
issues and ideology largely have been replaced by a more technologically mediated and
commercial means of propaganda: candidate construction and image making. Particu-
larly in the United States, where the primary voting system is used to build name recog-
nition and inculcate voter familiarity with politicians, political consultants are a crucial
resource to the candidates in capturing the attention of a largely disinterested electorate
(Blumler, Kavanagh, & Nossiter, 1996, p. 57).
Yet, despite the fact that the majority repeatedly chooses not to vote in local, state,
and national elections, elite spokespersons still hold up the ritual as the most valid test
of a government’s legitimacy. The symbolic value of elections is crucial in this respect.
But is it a meaningful exercise in representative democracy or merely a way of protect-
ing the status quo by engaging the public in a spectacular but largely meaningless simu-
lation of democracy in which the “process is pitched almost entirely toward winning. . .
not toward governing afterward” (Bennett, 1996, p. 161)? For Mancini and Swanson,
elections are the most important feature of democratic societies:
The manner in which democracies conduct their election campaigns is in

some ways as important as the results of the voting. The concept of democracy
rests, after all, on a view of appropriate procedures for selecting representatives
and making political decisions. Governments are regarded as democratic not
because their rhetoric describes them as such, but because their manner of
choosing decision makers is consistent with a recognizable conception of
democracy. The way in which a democracy conducts its election campaigns Q1
can empower or silence particular segments of the electorate, achieve or
disrupt a balance of power among institutions of government, support or
undercut the strength of political parties, and foster public support or alienation
from government. (Mancini & Swanson, 1996, pp. 1–2)
In the era of digital electronic communications, the traditional political and eco-
nomic interests that have run elections in the United States and elsewhere have increas-
ingly turned to professional communicators and communications technology specialists
to manage the politically symbolic aspects of electoral contests. Jürgen Habermas in
1974 called this the “scientificization” of politics, referring to the broader use of instru-
mental means to control the process of information, voter behavior, and, ultimately,
political results—a rationalization of politics and an appropriation of the public sphere
(Mancini & Swanson, 1996). The publisher and editor of Campaigns & Elections, which
has evolved from a public information to a trade journal, celebrates this process as one
in which “technology—and not candidates, consultants, or the press—is driving change”
(Faucheux, 1996, p. 5). Such a baldly technological determinist notion is another that
tends to deflect critique of the electoral process away from agencies of organized power—
as might be expected from a publication that glorifies the “modernizing” influence of
election professionals and their organizations.
In a context in which the concentration of wealth has reached such borderless pro-
portions that many corporations (and even a few individuals) have more assets than
nation states, politics is not simply being “professionalized,” it is becoming more inten-
sively industrialized, commercialized, monetized, and transnationalized. The extension
of commodification (that is, converting a public good or form of exchange into one
subject to private exchange relations) into the terrain of politics and into public and
household spaces previously beyond its reach or legitimate encroachment is part of a
process of hyperindustrialization. Telemarketing, for example, which penetrates and mines
households for valuable data, or cell phones that valorize commuting and other nonwork-
place spaces by tethering employees beyond the office, increasingly integrate and indus-
trialize both time and space as factors of production. A digitalized telecommunications
network that almost instantaneously locates and processes stored political soundtracks or
print data into “rapid rebuttals” for the six o’clock news makes the TV journalist complicit
in the symbolic war of words and images and in what is increasingly a megaindustry of
promotionalism, propaganda, and brand identity (Klein, 2000).
Hyperindustrialization has converted, standardized, and Taylorized much of modern
non-manufacturing work into scripted, repetitive, and deskilled technology-mediated tasks,
extending factory-like work processes to the supermarket, department store, fast food
restaurant, and to other service employment. In production and distribution, corporations

have adopted “synergizing” strategies to merge, concentrate, and vertically integrate in-
dustries and gain greater control over the brand marketing of products and lifestyles. A
profit-seeking commercial din with telecommunications portals to the household is also
increasingly part of other built and cultural environments, including public schools and
universities; it is also experienced in the commodification of what was once public in-
formation, extending all the way to the private patenting of life forms. These transfor-
mations are part of a political culture in which business rules are hegemonic and in
which remaining public spaces are assumed to be frontiers of future industrialization
and commoditization. With the escalation and fuller integration and penetration of cor-
porate funding, production technologies, and professional expertise into political space,
the electoral campaign and process is hardly recognizable as a public activity but rather
as just another management concern of the oligarchical private sector.
One of the more tepid disputes in the political science and trade journal literature
on electioneering is the argument about whether the growing use of U.S. campaign
practices around the world is representative of either “Americanization” or “moderniza-
tion.” The first implies the transfer of political culture; the second speaks more about a
functionalist rationality that is embedded in the process of economic and technological
innovation and development and increased segmentation of daily life ensconced within a
business culture. Farrell, Swanson, Mancini, Scammell, Negrine, and others debate the
question of political exports only between these two narrowly differentiated constructs.
What they overlook is how electioneering and corporate capitalism are part of an in-
creasingly industrially interlocked political economy that operates well beyond national
boundaries. It is not simply a matter of politics being essentially “American” or modern
(or even postmodern); rather, politics has become commercial, market-oriented, com-
moditized, and industrialized, privatized and less public, centralized while more decentered.2
It is not a postindustrial politics, as Mancini (1999) would have it, but a hyperindustrial
politics, a system of politics that has largely overcome amateur, spontaneous, or idiosyn-
cratic tendencies by adopting and extending principles of industrialism more deeply into
spaces of civil society—and into the public sphere, largely abolishing the idea of civic
engagement by a broadly energized public.
Corporate leaders have gotten the upper hand in setting the parameters of the political
agenda, organizing first at the nation state level (with the help of trade unions that ex-
pected to benefit from export-led growth) and eventually expanding to the supra-state
level (GATT, WTO, World Bank, IMF, European Union, NAFTA, TRIPS, WIPO, etc.).
Elections are now run in accordance with such core hyperindustrial principles as pro-
fessional specialization, subcontracting, extensive use of flexible forms of media and
digital information technologies for the collection, processing, and just-in-time editing and
delivery of data and images, and so forth—bringing citizens and households into the circuit
as factors of electoral production. Increasingly, media consultants draw on the success
of modern commodity advertising to sell candidates, emphasizing not so much their
content (issues) as their image, employing the constant use of focus groups and polling
not to incorporate public demand as much as to hone a saleable message and test the
effectiveness of their political propaganda. The information base developed in electronic
consumer surveillance for marketing products and brands is appropriated for marketing
candidates. Voters are seen by consultants not as citizens but as political consumers.
Engineering Electoral Consent

Political consulting is part of a flexible system of production, with electoral outcomes as

the product, using the same highly adaptive technologies that are employed in the re-
structuring of the world economy. Flexible production of elections is capital- and infor-
mation-intensive and, as in other sections of the economy, requires relatively few cam-
paign workers (the remaining labor-intensive campaigns having been passed on to the
“amateurs”). It uses digital technologies that can be located almost anywhere, are easily
adapted for multiple and recombinant applications, and can be employed in diverse po-
litical settings. A flexible electoral system commonly uses specialists who cross over
from other industries (and often whole continents) and who need not have any party
loyalties themselves. Globetrotting political consultants help establish or reinforce en-
claves of collaboration between different state elites and bring about a fuller integration
of politics and market economics, a standardization of politics and political discourses
that emphasize market choices and technocracy as the measure of rational decision mak-
ing and freedom and the “inefficiencies” of public spending.
The technical sophistication of managing elections has so impressed the power elites
in many other countries that American consultants are being treated as indispensable in
helping their candidates capture state power. The International Association of Political
Consultants (IAPC), the who’s who of the global consulting industry, was co-founded in
1968 by Joseph Napolitan and Michel Bongrand in Paris after the former ran the presi-
dential campaign of Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippine dictator who held power for 20
years (Bowler & Farrell, 2000, p. 162; Napolitan, 1999, pp. 24–25). This “international”
association is, in fact, overwhelmingly dominated by U.S. consultants: 45 of the 91
registered members as of 1997. Of the 33 members who claimed to have worked over-
seas, 58% were U.S.-based (Farrell, 1998, p. 172). Such numbers actually understate the
influence of U.S. consultants, as many of the non-U.S. members were trained by Ameri-
can election professionals, attended American-run political seminars, or were publicly or
privately sponsored campaign observers of U.S. elections.
With the aid of networked communications, political consultants are better situated
in managing elections than ever before. Their strongest hand is in image construction
and in political makeovers of candidates, their weakest where serious local and domestic
issues are on the agenda, but here they usually assemble local teams to help to natural-
ize and creolize the imported political format. On assignment to foreign countries, their
political and technological skills seem to work best when not forced to deal with histori-
cal, social, and cultural specificities, but rather confined to universalized themes. Latin
America, where strong, caudillo-style presidential leadership is traditional, albeit ad-
justed to more recent demands for symbolic democratic forms, is ripe for U.S.-style
electioneering and is, in fact, the external region most intensively worked by U.S. con-
sultants (Plasser & Plasser, 2002).
Critical changes in electoral processes, particularly in the United States but in-
creasingly in other countries, include the shift from party-centered to candidate-centered
politics.3 Another is the growing technification of campaign management and control. A
third is the drift from an issue-oriented to a star-system-based symbolic politics. The
growing convergence of public relations, advertising, and political consulting in the United
States has naturalized corporate financial and management control of the election pro-
cess. Political consulting has become a growth industry, with $6 billion in domestic
billings alone by the late 1990s (Plasser, 2000, p. 40) and with some 7,000 full-time
professionals servicing some 50,000 national, state, and local campaigns per year. Typi-
cally, they are White (94.12%), male (81.8%), and fortyish (the average age is 45.9
years), with average incomes of over $122,000 (Thurber & Dulio, 1999, p. 28). The
ubiquitous political pollsters “accustomed to assisting candidates on the campaign trail

spend their afternoons and evenings convening focus groups, testing advertisements for
products, helping to craft commercial spots, or searching for just the right wording for
public relations materials” (Novotny, 2000, p. 12). With a clientele base delinked from
capricious economic cycles, there is plenty of work to go around. The consulting indus-
try took in over $1 billion in election year billings as of 1996 (Clark, 1996, p. 867;
Wilson Quarterly, 2000, p. 119) and probably tripled those earnings in 2000.
Show Me the Money: The Role of Corporate PACs and Lobbyists

Ignoring the financial nexus, it is easy to see why a number of academics view pro-
fessionalization as the driving force in modern politics. But it is actually the money
game of politics, what Ferguson (1995) describes as an “investment theory” of politics,
not merely its derivative professionalism, that fuels professionalization, industrialization,
globalization, and corporate cooptation. The Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo decision
in 1976, which essentially equated campaign financing to “free speech,” was a major
step toward the commercialization of political speech, and indeed the First Amendment
itself. Although there are some restraints on the amount and form of money that can be
given by individual and PAC contributors, there is no lid on the total amount of money
that a candidate or the candidate’s backers can ultimately spend on a primary or elec-
tion. The sea of dollars during the election cycles has opened the floodgates for the
entry of the campaign brokers, the consultants.
At least three-fourths of open seat contests and two-thirds of incumbents in the
House employ professional consultants, while mainly for lack of money, only 16.5% of
challengers use them (Thurber, 1998). Moreover, for many political consultants, includ-
ing President Clinton’s pollster, Stanley Greenberg, advertising, marketing, polling, and
public relations are complementary and seasonal occupations that share revolving doors
between political and corporate clients.4 As one regular political commentator notes,
“The pollsters, strategists and media experts who shape political campaigns are playing
an increasingly prominent role in campaigns for nonpolitical clients, helping corpora-
tions, trade associations and advocacy groups sway public opinion and win support on
Capitol Hill” (Barnes, 1995, p. 1330). It is becoming a pastime, for example, for retired
politicians, such as former House Speaker Tom Foley and former U.S. senators Bob
Packwood and Dennis DeConcini, to turn to consulting as a way of parlaying insider
status into a service for arranging corporate influence peddling.
In the circuit of money transfers, large corporate-based PACs5 share the media’s
love for this style of bankrolling politics, because it enables concentrated financial power
to exercise direct electoral intervention. Money effectively becomes the currency of speech.
In the 1995–1996 election cycle, PACs raised $437.4 million for various office seekers,
including $203.9 million to House and Senate candidates (out of $790.5 million raised),
plus $10.6 million more in independent expenditures for and against candidates, accord-
ing to Common Cause and the Federal Election Commission. The total congressional
and presidential campaign expenditure for 1995–1996 was $2,131.2 million,6 of which
the presidential campaign expenditure amounted to $471.6 million. Party hard and soft
money amounted to $894.3 million (Common Cause, 1999; Federal Election Commis-
sion, 1997). The top 10 donors in soft money contributions alone contributed more than
$14.2 million to congressional campaigns (Center for Responsive Politics, 1997).7
The soft money contribution to campaigns grew enormously during the 1990s. Dur-
ing the 1995–1996 presidential election cycle, $235.9 million was raised by the Demo-
cratic and Republican national party committees, which was almost three times the amount
raised, $84.4 million, in 1991–1992. By 1999–2000, the figure had nearly doubled again
to $463.1 million. In non-presidential election years, which normally show a decline in
fund raising, a rapid soft money expansion continued, more than doubling ($160.1 mil-
lion compared to $67.4 million) between the first halves of the 1997–1998 and 2001–
2002 cycles (Common Cause, 2001, 2002).
In defense of their privileged position in the campaign money circuit, media/com-
munications conglomerates, which absorb the bulk of campaign expenditures, have been
themselves among the leading PACs and lobbyists in opposition to campaign reform.
Initiatives of the FCC to require free campaign air time have been strenuously resisted
in the Senate, initially including commerce committee chair and “reformer” John McCain,
until the commission, threatened with funding cutbacks, was forced to retreat (Lewis,
2000). From 1996 to mid-2000, the 50 largest media companies and four of their trade
associations spent $111.3 million to lobby Congress and the Executive office, $31.4
million in 1999 alone, in addition to providing legislators with regular “fact-finding
mission” junkets. McCain, who collected almost $700.000 from 1993 to mid-2000, the
most of any Congress member, and who came through for the industry by leading a bill
that would raise the ownership cap for any television network from a 35% to a 50%
share of the national audience, has since assumed the leadership in support of campaign
finance reform and a television free air time law.8 Time Warner, which announced what
became a $106 billion media/communications merger with AOL, spent $4.1 million in
lobbying expenses in 1999, and Walt Disney was right behind with $3.3 million. The
two have kicked in almost $9 million in campaign funds since 1993. Among the other
leading lobbies are tobacco, securities and investment, telecommunications, real estate,
energy, and pharmaceuticals and industrial supplies (Common Cause, 2000a).
There are many ways, too many to address here, in which corporate engagement
appropriates the political process toward self-serving outcomes. One critic summarily
observes:
Along with the slick brochures, expert testimony, and technical reports, corporate
lobbyists still offer the succulent campaign contributions, the “volunteer”
campaign workers, the fat lecture fees, the stock awards and insider stock
market tips, the easy-term loans, the high-paying corporate directorship upon
retirement from office, the lavish parties and accommodating female escorts,
the prepaid vacation jaunts, the luxury hotels and private jets, the free housing
and meals, and the many other hustling enticements of money. (Parenti, 1995,
pp. 207–208)
Technologies of Political Consumption and Control

Campaign communications is about how to manipulate data, information, and images as
part of a technology-intensive “rationalization of persuasion” (Mancini, 1999, p. 235),
while traditional modes of authoritative, face-to-face communication, with emphasis given
to highly stylized and commanding oratory, are now largely of the past. The technolo-
gies employed are also the outcome of a complex network of industrial manufacturers,
software designers, and specialists who ply in the trades of customized applications of
electronic media, advertising, and information management, all of which demand a high
level of capital investment.
The main trade journal of the industry, Campaigns & Elections, lists among the
specialties in professional campaigning database management, fund-raising software, website

consultants, media purchasing, focus group analysts, satellite services, videotape produc-
tion and duplication, telemarketing, legal compliance attorneys, and media consultants.
GeoVoter, a national database firm, offers candidates “campaign targeting software built
on individual demographics”; Campaign Connections advertises its direct mail, strategic
planning, and media services for sale; CampaignOffice.com sells its “top-notch website
creation” and “online fundraising” expertise; and DG Systems provides “satellite-based
audio and video creation and distribution services” for rapid response and targeted po-
litical advertising throughout the country. With election professionals apparently in con-
trol, local party organizers and the phalanx of loyal political volunteers are bypassed as
the critical element in the planning of election strategies and tactics. Modern elections
are based on a simple maxim: “It’s the consultants, stupid!”
The expanded influence of political communications specialists corresponds with
decreased levels of political participation.9 Political consultants, in fact, will readily ac-
knowledge their preference for smaller election turnouts, as predictability (and therefore
their credibility) is greater with the participation of the more reliable and targeted voters.
This contributes to a very low level of citizen participation that distinguishes the United
States from the rest of the industrialized world, and so-called “negative campaigning” is
explicitly designed to suppress voter turnout. Nonvoters are actually the largest single
bloc, far larger than membership in any political party. Moreover, as the two dominant
political parties largely coalesce where transnational interests are concerned (e.g., the
World Trade Organization, NAFTA, deregulation), the need for symbolic conflict be-
comes all the more important as a way of maintaining the mythos of electoral choice.
In electoral contests, personality, “character,” and “leadership” emphases tend to
take front stage. Swanson and Mancini acknowledge that the marketing approach to
campaigning gives rise to an emphasis “on the personalities of party leaders, for appeal-
ing personalities are currency of high denomination in media logic” (Swanson & Mancini,
1996, p. 251). These are the areas of image construction where political consultants,
pollsters, and communications, advertising, and public relations experts excel. Murray
Edelman observes, “The intense publicity given to voting and elections is itself a potent
signal of the essential powerlessness of political spectators because elections are implic-
itly a message about the limits of power.” At the same time, the spectacle of elections
and other “dramatic incidents involving individuals in the limelight displace attention
from the larger configurations that explain the incidents and much else as well” (Edelman,
1988, pp. 97, 102).
Professional political consulting in the United States goes at least as far back as the
1930s. What has changed is the technostructure for information transfer that radically
reduces the friction of space as an impediment in campaign management. The universal-
izing of television, telephone, computers, fax, Internet, polling techniques, electronically
generated mass mailing, and other electronic media has tended to mass produce and
homogenize the electoral process while at the same time enabling a customizing of
messages to suit the values, tastes, and lifestyles of “group demographics.” It is the
flexible fordist system of modern day politics—centralized control with decentralized
operational capacity and a capacity for small batch production of customized sound
bites and issue packaging for local and targeted audiences that stylizes the candidate as
someone for everyone.
The Dole campaign in 1996 sent an e-mailed newsletter to anyone who registered at
their website, which provided information and upcoming events (Connell, 1997, p. 64).
Other candidates have set up electronic bulletin boards, which, in addition to the “per-
sonal touch” of e-mailing, can be used in polling, announcing candidate appearances,

responding to potential voter questions, coordinating communication with both voters
and staff members, and doing trial runs on issue approaches (Graff, 1992, p. 24). One of
the leading PAC money recipients, Dole had plenty of money to spend on electioneer-
ing, even while he acknowledged that “when these political action committees give
money, they expect something in return other than good government. It is making it
difficult to legislate” (cited in Bennett, 1996, p. 95). The level of PAC spending does
not in the end guarantee favorable legislation and administration, but it does assure
access to legislators and usually limits the parameters of debate.
The failed Ross Perot campaign in 1992 spent almost $60 million, 98% of it from
the candidate’s personal account, and relied heavily on the use of “800” numbers and a
database of supporters. However, when Perot brought two veteran consultants into the
campaign, Hamilton Jordon and Ed Rollins, there was a wave of protest among rank
and file supporters, who complained about the professionalization of the “United We
Stand” organization (Poor, 1992, p. B1). At the other end of the organizational spec-
trum, Bill Clinton had a “war room” that monitored newswires, talk radio, cable news,
and satellite broadcasts from anywhere in the world on a 24-hour basis, enabling the
candidate to respond to every attack on his candidacy, so that “no charge went unno-
ticed; no charge went unanswered.” The war room also used fax machines, modems,
interactive satellites, and wireless phones to respond to issues and events at a moment’s
notice and in time for the nightly news—or to alert the media of Clinton’s arrival in a
city or town for maximum coverage (Myers, 1993, pp. 181–182).
Like the U.S. military, the country’s corps of political consultants is the best equipped
in the world. Their tools of trade, shared with commercial advertising and public rela-
tions (which engage many consultants off-season), have become the standard in the
control of informational and spin factors in American elections—and increasingly in
other countries. Just as a host of information gathering and processing technologies—
from checkout counter scanners, to credit card readers, to website cookies—collect data
and create consumer profiles based on purchases, Internet usage, and personal demo-
graphics, information techniques and technologies (polling, telemarketing, database management,
etc.) are also put to use in collecting and categorizing data on political preferences and
voting behavior. This allows both consumer and political advertisers to target citizens
with messages that are likely to resonate with their individual values, tastes, and lifestyles—
breaking out citizens from their broader constituency identities and segmenting voters
into seemingly diverse issue blocs.
Among the prime beneficiaries of the political-industrial complex are the mass
media. The media and, in concert, the political consultants maximize income from the
electoral process by spinning its “dramatic” elements: personal conflict, controversy,
and a good horse race. The closer the “contest,” the higher the level of candidate expen-
ditures. In the process, substantive controversies such as income disparities, high rates
of poverty and underemployment, inadequate educational, housing, and health care in-
vestment, capital flight, and a host of other issues pertinent to working class voters—
and what should be treated as the scandal of extremely low voter turnouts10—get lost in
mass media coverage and the advertising industry’s packaging of the “issues.” The logic
of “professionalization” is that it normalizes and homogenizes the capture of politics
within the market system. When U.S. consultants take their election package abroad,
they help reshape and reconstitute the style and meanings of campaigns, introduce fund
raising as a critical factor into politics, and alter leadership styles, which in the case of
Australia helped trivialize issues and turned campaigning and fund raising into capital
rather than labor intensive activities. The result is to place further distance between the
political parties and the voters, making the parties seem less relevant as vehicles for
mass political representation. (Elaine Thompson, cited in Plasser, 2000, p. 44)
Media industries in particular are very much at home with the notion of the “pro-
fessionalization” of political contests, both for its implicit ideological claim that tech-
nique and expertise, rather than concentrated power, is the agency of political change
and because its assumption assures that bounteous revenues will flow to “the messen-
ger.” Each election season confers a windfall of billions of dollars upon the mass media
(especially television), which receives half or more of all campaign expenditures. Races
for House and Senate seats in 1996 cost at least $660 million, and spending in all
elections that year exceeded $2 billion. The average Senate campaign took $4.5 million,
which means that each senator had to generate $14,000 in contributions per week over
the six year term. (Economist, 1997)
The amount of campaign dollars that flows to broadcast media has escalated to all-
time highs. In 1996, political advertising contributed about $400 million in national,
state, and local elections.11 The same year, incumbent John Kerry (D-MA) poured $5
million into radio and television ads, more than half of his $9.6 million campaign pool
raised since 1991, to defeat Republican Massachusetts governor William Weld for the
Senate (Common Cause, 1997). In 1992, Clinton and Bush spent 60% of their campaign
budgets on television ads (Clark, 1996, p. 868). Close races are particularly attractive to
television media, because it means that candidates will empty their coffers on advertis-
ing to get a victory. The 2000 election campaigns were calculated to pay out $1 billion
in political commercials, according to Paine Webber, and Campaigns & Elections esti-
mated $14 billion for the 2000–2004 election cycle (Wayne, 2000, pp. A1, A14).
Like other forms of advertising, the selling of candidates for elected office favors
rapid-fire, often subliminal images, nine-second soundbites (down from 45 seconds
in the early 1980s), and staged events (Postman & Powers, 1992, p. 82). This form
panders to photo opportunities, character stereotypes, and political attacks. Without a
framework and far too little time, information, or substance on which voters can make
rational choices, the short “spot” political ads that mark U.S. elections typically resort to
phrases that stick in the voters’ consciousness (e.g., “Read my lips, no new taxes”). This
is a technique obviously borrowed from product advertising.
The cost factor of television not only shuts out candidates without deep pockets
or corporate backers; it also forces candidates to speak the grammar and idiom of
television, which reduces issue articulation to the level that commercial media deem
appropriate for “effective” message construction and transmission. In this way, tele-
vision sets the terms and limits of the discourse. In Britain, to date, TV spots for politi-
cal advertising are not permitted, and political parties “receive no campaign or organiza-
tional state finance” with limitations on local spending by individual candidates (Farrell,
1998, pp. 173–174). On the continent, all television spot advertising in political cam-
paigns was banned until quite recently. Countries now permitting political TV advertis-
ing include France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Sweden (Farrell, 1996, p. 173).
Transnationalization of Politics
Major consulting companies advertise their client victories like trophy lists. Some recent
big name firms in the U.S. have included Morris & Carrick for media, Garin Hart Yang
for polling, and Crounse & Malchow for direct mail. Phil Noble & Associates boasts a
client list that includes the British Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party of Sweden,
and the African National Congress. In Britain, Saatchi and Saatchi, one of the largest
commercial advertising firms in the world (with billings in the United States alone of $274
million in 1996) and previously on hire for the Tories (and the National Party in South
Africa), is said to have “effectively transformed the role of marketing specialists in British
politics from technicians to strategists” (Johnson, 2000, p. 43; Scammell, 1999, p. 733).
The growing political economic convergence between the United States and other
leading industrial powers is rooted in a neoliberal agenda that puts global “supply-side”
trade and financial interests ahead of national and public sector priorities. Neoliberalism
is associated with the expansion of transnational corporate power, the development of a
worldwide digital communications infrastructure, the lowering of trade and investment
barriers, and the trumpeting of market ideology. The weakening of statist economics is
paralleled in the political sphere, where the drumbeat is for downsizing and deregula-
tion. When U.S. economic consultants went to former socialist countries starting in the
early 1990s to advise them on how to make the transition to a market economy, the
political consultants were not far behind. In Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in east Eu-
rope, a Harvard University economist group led by Jeffrey Sachs, Lawrence Summers,
and David Lipton helped devise a strategy of “stabilization,” privatization, and liberal-
ization of trade and investment, while people such as Phil Noble and Stanley Greenberg
(also from Harvard) did political consulting in the region. Both sets of actors see needed
respective changes in terms of open markets that permit American or other Western
ideas to directly influence the process of governing and rule-making.
Parliamentary democracy in Western Europe is different from the U.S. system in
some important ways. However, even there a shift is evident in the declining importance
of political parties, a bigger voice of transnational corporate interests, greater emphasis
on individual candidates, and the willingness to devote more resources to getting indi-
viduals elected. One key difference is that European parties and states provide most of
the funding for elections, whereas in the United States, there is a far higher proportion
of financing from private corporations and wealthy individuals. Another is that cam-
paigns are usually of shorter duration, and many countries have restrictions on televised
political advertising, though offering all or some of it for free.
Nonetheless, Britain provides a good example of a country taking on increasingly
commercial and industrial styles of electioneering. During the early postwar years, Brit-
ain, with a dominant two-party structure, was not open to U.S. consultants because of
what Joseph Napolitan (often touted in the trade literature as the first general political
consultant)12 considered their “chauvinistic shell.” The Thatcher government, with its
strong pro-business, pro-U.S., anti-union orientation, overcame such inhibitions, as “the

1979 campaign of the Conservative party made extensive use of techniques and person-
nel from the U.S., prompting [Larry] Sabato to remark that the ‘aloof and skeptical
British politicians [were] coming around’” (Farrell, 1998, p. 173). And although Britain
still has tighter restrictions on the exposure and campaign financing of candidates, there
is a growing tendency of politicians, journalists, and campaign advisors in that country
to be complicit in the use of soundbites, news management, and spin-doctoring, and to
have a “disdainful attitude toward. . . party-organized electioneering” (Blumler, Kavanagh,
& Nossiter, 1996, p. 68).
Prime minister Tony Blair clearly drew much of his political style and message
from Bill Clinton. It was a “Third Way” love match of the New Democrats and New
Labour. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that Clinton’s campaign managers, Greenberg
and Carville, teamed up to help Blair win the 1997 British election for the Labour Party
(and Greenberg joined Labour for the return match in 2001). Greenberg also has been a
business partner of Blair’s focus group director, Philip Gould (Campbell, 1999), and
Gould, in turn, has consulted for the Danish and Swedish Social Democrats and even
for Bill Clinton (Farrell, 1996, p. 178). Greenberg, Carville, and Gould established the
London-based NOP-Research Group as a high-powered transnational consulting organi-
zation in 1997 (Plasser, 2000, p. 45) that does public relations research for transnational
corporations between election seasons.
Blair’s move toward the center is characteristic of Otto Kirchheimer’s observation
in the 1960s of the tendency of Western political parties and interest groups to formally
separate their identities from one another. Conservative parties (Republicans, Tories)
publicly downplayed their associations with big business, and liberals (Democrats, Labour)
with unions, which encouraged powerful interests to pursue their objectives through
“catch-all” party strategies. “The interest group,” Kirchheimer urged, “must never put
all its eggs in one basket” (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 193). This approach has worked well
for corporate interests in the United States, which are freed up to patronize both catch-
all parties and thus block the formation of independent political parties, though not so
well for trade unions—as the air traffic controllers bitterly learned in 1980. The centrist
tendencies of catch-all British and American elections reduce the importance of issues
and elevate the importance of personality, style, and the “who’s ahead?” elements of
elections as well as the increased reliance on expertise, software, and corporate funding.
One of the best documented cases of foreign consulting is the case of the Israeli
prime minister election of May 1999. James Carville, who had managed Bill Clinton’s
campaigns, together with veterans Robert Shrum and Stanley Greenberg, all Democrats,
arrived in that Middle East country to score a victory for Ehud Barak of the Labor
party. Arthur J. Finkelstein, parachuted in from the Republican side, was master cam-
paign guru for Benjamin Netanyahu, heading the Likud ticket. Carville and Finkelstein,
known for their skill with the attack ad, had good material with which to work. Barak is
a Stanford-trained engineer, and Benjamin Netanyahu is a former student at MIT and
Harvard in management and political science. Making the point, Adam Nagourney noted
in a New York Times Magazine piece that “in assailing Netanyahu, Barak has invoked
the line ‘too many lies for too long’—the very same slogan that Democrats in the United
States used so successfully last fall against another Finkelstein client, Alfonse M. D’Amato.”
Three years earlier, Netanyahu, following Finkelstein’s advice, used a standard from the
U.S. campaign playbook to win the election: “Do you feel safer today than three years
ago?” With U.S. professional mentoring, slogans had successfully overwhelmed the issues
(Nagourney, 1999, p. 44; Wilkinson, 1999, p. A16).
While Israel is one of the better documented cases where external consultants have
been used, there are many other examples of foreign election management. In most
cases, rival parties prefer to either not reveal or play down the fact that foreign consult-
ants, especially those from the United States, are involved in their election efforts. While
Carville and Greenberg were on contract to Mexico’s presidential candidate, Francisco
Labastida, from the ruling PRI party, another former Clinton political advisor, Dick
Morris, a consultant comfortable crossing political party lines (and who previously paired
off against Carville in consulting for Argentine primary candidates), was working the
other side of the fence for PAN candidate Vicente Fox Quesada. As a former executive
for Coca Cola, Fox was perfect material for an advertising-intensive campaign and was
reported to have asked his political marketing manager “to ‘sell me’ like any other
product” (Dillon, 2000, p. A6). Still another Democratic party consultant, Doug Schoen,
consulted for Roberto Madrazo Pintado, governor of the oil-rich, and by many accounts
very corrupt, state of Tabasco, who lost out in the PRI nominating primary (Stevenson,
2000). Madrazo is now poised to become party leader of the PRI.

Canadian politics, too, is gradually adopting the habits of its southern neighbor,
including recent tendencies to resort to character attacks. There are some important dif-
ferences between the two political systems, however. Canada’s parliamentary system
does not invest the prime minister, the leader of the dominant political party and the
government, with the same degree of power or status that is conferred on the U.S.
president. Another difference is that the Canadian House of Commons currently has five
established political parties, compared to the two (some would argue effectively one) in
the United States. The political campaign is also a more constrained affair, with only 8
days permitted to conduct paid media campaigns (DeMont, 1997, p. 27) and with about
two months of intense reporting. The limits on polling and political advertising have
been challenged in the courts, however, favoring a new tendency that looks more like
that of the superpower.
Carville featured as a consultant to the reelection campaign of Liberal prime min-
ister Jean Chrétien in the 1997 national election. The Conservatives also went looking
for American professionals, hiring Capitol beltway consultants The Tarrance Group of
Alexandria, Virginia, which previously had accounts in the Philippines, France, and
Romania. This is a sensitive issue for Canadians, and the more nationalistic elements in
government avoid being associated with U.S. politics and culture. It was somewhat of
an embarrassment to the federal government when the Ottawa press revealed that “the
Canadian Information Office, its so-called unity agency, brought Bill Clinton’s famous
attack-dog strategist, James Carville, to Montreal in 1997 for a two-day retreat” (Phillips,
1999, p. 38). According to Stephen Hess, senior fellow of government studies at the
Brookings Institution, American consultants “are unconnected to governance . . . [and
therefore] will do anything they think will work to get a candidate elected without con-
nection to consequences” (Prusher, 1999, p. 1).
In the 1996 Russian election for president, the country’s first American consult-
ants were brought in to save the world for capitalism and for Boris Yeltsin against the
Communist party challenger, Gannady Zyuganov. Consultants for Republican governor
Pete Wilson and close associates of Clinton advisor Dick Morris, together with a TV
advertising production company, Video International, all worked under cloaked arrange-
ments in Yeltsin’s camp, passing on to their Russian counterparts the art of spin doctor-
ing. They boasted of saving Yeltsin from certain defeat and Russia from a return to the
Cold War, and admitted to using a host of dirty tricks in their advertising strategy to
sow fear among Russians. Their political ads, mostly aired over state-run television and
radio stations, warned that a Zyuganov victory would bring back a command economy
and a climate of terror (Hellinger, 1996, pp. 10–11). Ignored were the out-of-control
economy, Yeltsin’s own predilections for autocratic control, and his broad use of repres-
sive tactics while serving as an unelected head of state. A Time correspondent rational-
ized the intervention in pure Machiavellian logic: “Democracy triumphed—and along
with it came the tools of modern campaigns, including the trickery and slickery Ameri-
cans know so well. If these tools are not always admirable, the result they helped achieve
in Russia surely is” (Kramer, 1996).13
Conclusions: The Politics of Image and the Image of Politics

The image making work of political consultants is certainly important within the exist-
ing political process but only at the final stage of the whole performance of the election
spectacle. A critique of political practices in the United States should begin with an
examination of the organization of power. The selection of candidates, presided over by

organized interests and gatekeepers, starts long before the campaign and the hiring of
consultants. While the professionals further segment the organization of U.S. politics,
they are not independent of the larger role that interest elites have always played in the
society. Consistent with much of post-industrial and postmodern thinking, the professional-
ization notion, which elevates the status of technocracy and crafted images, tends to
ignore how organized power, as Machiavelli understood but in a different historical
context, is a central discursive construct in the maintenance of political legitimacy.
The linkage of the professionalization of politics and the decline of political parties
has long been noted (Nimmo, 1970; Sabato, 1981; Salmore & Salmore; 1985), not only
in the United States but also in other Western democracies. It has been observed that
Tony Blair’s campaign relied heavily on communications professionals for news man-
agement and spin doctoring. For Mancini, it is the political consultants who dominate
not only the technical aspects of elections but even what used to be the exclusive
domain of the party—campaign organization and everyday decision-making authority
(Mancini, 1999, pp. 236–237). It is a bewildering notion that the consultants managed to
capture this central domain of political life, autonomous from corporate agenda setting.
Politics in the United States certainly has shifted in the postwar era—from a system
dominated by political parties and local party machines to one more directly supervised
by organized transnational economic interests whose financial support is a quid pro quo
for political access and favorable policy treatment (see Sussman, forthcoming, for an
extended treatment of the money-policy nexus). Campaign professionals are important
as managers in the construction of successful candidacies, which helps relieve the latter
of party dependency and accountability to a governing program or ideology. Discur-
sively, the professionalization thesis shifts the public gaze away from the question of
how organized transnational interests, including media corporations, employ election events,
symbolism, and public engagement to sustain their own legitimacy and reproduction.
Professionalization facilitates more direct influence of political action committees
and direct contributions from corporate interests, eliminates much of the guesswork and
horsetrading in politics, and rationalizes the best electoral system that money can buy.
Those without deep pockets, corporate support, and the favorable attention of the mass
media, however, are excluded from serious political consideration. This is not as en-
trenched a system elsewhere as it is in the United States. But it increasingly is becoming
the European reality, and foreign consultants are learning from their American peers the
modern means of “manufacturing consent.”
Under FCC licensing provisions, broadcasters can only deny political advertisements
that fail to meet the time and technical standards of their stations, that do not name
sponsors, or that are considered obscene. As a result, what the public learns about politi-
cal candidates is often based on false or misleading statements, manipulation of sym-
bols, and deceptive audio and visual cues. Success in political campaigns, especially at
the state-wide and national level, highly correlates with the amount of money spent per
voter in procuring advertising, and those parties and candidates not backed by corporate
capital are effectively blacked out from the ears and eyes of most voters (Jamieson,
1992; Bennett, 1996).
Elections in the United States have come to resemble the cycle of commodity pro-
duction, which routinely includes the use of focus groups, advertising strategies, media
saturation, and texts that play to voter (consumer) gratifications. Nicholas Garnham ob-
served that
politicians appeal to potential voters not as rational beings concerned for the
public good, but in the mode of advertising, as creatures of passing and
largely irrational appetite, whose self-interest they must purchase. The campaigners
thus address citizens within the set of social relations that have been created
for other purposes. Thus the citizen is addressed as a private individual rather
than a member of the public, within a privatized domestic sphere rather than
within public life. (Garnham, 1990, p. 111)
After a lifetime in politics, former U.S. Republican senator Mark Hatfield concluded,
“When you look at the political-industrial complex, you see a whole new industry. . .
reaching such heights that neither the public nor the political institutions are in a posi-
tion to do much about it. It’s a runaway” (Hamilton, 2000, p. A12).
Conceivably, a political structure governed much less by concentrated wealth and
monopoly power might yield communication professionals, not necessarily today’s prac-
titioners, willing to employ electoral techniques that more closely respond to the ideal of
maximizing public participation and political enlightenment. Even Mancini concedes in
a different political context: “Bearers of proven specific specialized skills, these [com-
mercial sector communications] professionals would lend their expertise to the service
of a civil cause” (Mancini, 1999, p. 242). But in democratic terms, this would mean a
very different set of assumptions about what constitutes political participation. The focus
of the problem of U.S. elections is misplaced, however, when it singles out the profes-
sionals and “professionalization” as the causal vector. The real issue is a political struc-
ture that over time has been flexibly adopted to the needs of an expansive corporate
class, now with global stakes, one that will leave no stone unturned in its quest to more
fully monopolize both economics and politics and the pervasive symbolic activities within
the vestiges of the public sphere.
Notes
1. One measure of the political-industrial complex is transnational advertising. A U.S.
company, McCannErickson, is the world’s leading advertising agency. Proctor & Gamble, with
$1 to $1.2 billion spent (1996) on television promotions alone ($2.6 billion overall), is the nation’s
largest product advertiser (Eliot, 1997, pp. C1, C8). By the early 1990s, the largest two U.S. ad
agencies already earned more than half their income abroad (King, 1990, p. 26).
2. The decentering of politics enables campaign headquarters to both centrally control the
management of the election while encouraging local, customized advertising messages to be used
in places where they are most effective.
3. Doris Kearns Goodwin, a scholar and regular analyst on PBS’ News Hour with Jim
Lehrer, observed, following the last of the Gore-Bush debates on October 17, 2000, that both
candidates spoke about policy only in first person terms, what they would do, never acknowledg-
ing the legacies of their respective parties. This is but one indication of the decline in the status
of political parties and how candidates relate to them and the emphasis given to the person,
personality, and “character” of the candidates.
4. On the media side of the revolving door, the National Association of Broadcasters
(NAB) has 20 registered lobbyists, seven of whom served on congressional staffs, the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC), and the Federal Trade Commission. From 1996 to 1998,
the NAB, together with ABC, CBS, A. H. Belo, Meredith Corporation, and Cox Enterprises,
spent $11 million to defeat a range of bills mandating free air time for political candidates (Lewis,
2000).
5. The ten largest industry soft money donors from January 1, 1999, to mid-2000 were
(rounded): securities and investments, $24.2 million; telecommunications, $17.8 million; labor
unions, $16.1 million; computers and electronics, $13.1 million; real estate, $12.8 million; law-
yers and lobbyists, $12 million; insurance, $10.2 million; pharmaceuticals and medical supplies,
$9.2 million; entertainment and media, $8.9 million; and transportation, $8.9 million (Common
Cause, 2000b).
6. The New York Times reported at the end of 1997 that the figure was $2.2 billion (Abramson,
1997, p. A18), up from $1.6 billion in 1992, of which three-fourths was spent on television and
mail advertising (Strother, 1999, p. 188).
7. The top 10 were (in order): Philip Morris, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, RJR Nabisco,
Walt Disney Co., Atlantic Richfield, Communications Workers of America, American Federation
of State, County & Municipal Employees, AT&T, Federal Express Corp., and MCI Telecommu-
nications. The calculation of hard and soft money contributions, monitored by groups such as
Common Cause, does not include spending by “stealth PACs,” which are organizations that use a
loophole in the 1996 federal tax code to hide their expenditures on elections that do not specifi-
cally advocate for or against candidates.
8. Prior to his “conversion,” McCain went to bat for General Electric’s NBC television
interests by writing to the FCC to approve a broadcast license request by a company, Paxson
Communications, in which it is seeking controlling interest—“a day after the senator flew on the
company’s corporate jet” (Lewis, 2000).
9. Robert Putnam discusses the decline of civic and political participation as not just elec-
tion cycle activity but also membership in civic organizations (Putnam, 1995).
10. The United States has by far the lowest election turnouts of any of the leading industri-
alized countries. Were third world countries, especially “enemy” states, to have election participa-
tion rates of 50% or lower, which is typical of the United States, it is likely that the State
Department would not recognize their legitimacy. Average turnouts of other industrial countries
in lower house elections between 1960 and 1995 include: Australia (95%), Austria (92%), Bel-
gium (91%), Italy (90%), New Zealand (88%), Denmark (87%), Germany (86%), Sweden (86%),
Greece (86%), the Netherlands (83%), Norway (81%), Israel (80%), Portugal (79%), Finland
(78%), Canada (76%), France (76%), the United Kingdom (75%), Ireland (74%), Spain (73%),
Japan (71%), and the United States (54%) (Franklin, 1996, p. 218).
11. Broadcast television alone took in more than $30 billion in overall ad revenues that
year, much of which came from the same sources that funded the political campaigns that year.
12. This may be nothing more than another chauvinist claim to “invention.” Political rulers
have had advisors or consultants since ancient times. Machiavelli, author of The Prince in 1532,
can be regarded as one of the modern members of that profession.
13. Yeltsin was widely regarded as corrupt, and “more than 65% believed he had wrecked
the economy.” Nonetheless, the American “heroics” in Russia (Time ran a cover story called
“Yanks to the Rescue”) inspired a film produced by Showtime (Kramer, 1996).
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The Global Reproduction of American Politics

GERALD SUSSMAN and LAWRENCE GALIZIO

The process of economic transnationalization and liberalization that has accelerated

Keywords communications, globalization, political campaigns, political consultants,

This article examines the transformation, commodification, and transnationalization of

The “digital citizen” prefigures the possibility of direct interactions among

Elections as Symbolic Exchange

The manner in which democracies conduct their election campaigns is in

restaurant, and to other service employment. In production and distribution, corporations

Engineering Electoral Consent

Political consulting is part of a flexible system of production, with electoral outcomes as

ubiquitous political pollsters “accustomed to assisting candidates on the campaign trail

Show Me the Money: The Role of Corporate PACs and Lobbyists

Technologies of Political Consumption and Control

specialties in professional campaigning database management, fund-raising software, website

sonal touch” of e-mailing, can be used in polling, announcing candidate appearances,

strong pro-business, pro-U.S., anti-union orientation, overcame such inhibitions, as “the

2000). Madrazo is now poised to become party leader of the PRI.

Conclusions: The Politics of Image and the Image of Politics

examination of the organization of power. The selection of candidates, presided over by

247–276). Westport, CT: Praeger.

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