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means are limited again. Most parties monitor media during campaigns, tracking how
the party and the leader are doing in public opinion, and they begin employing forms
of news management, and use data from media monitoring to adjust their campaign
strategies. Very few information officers, however, consider themselves ‘spin doctors’;
most of them publicly loathe the concept, but they all try it regularly, one way or the
other,if only to counter interpretative frames coming from the media.There are enough
examples of successful and failed attempts, but systematic research as to its saliency
and success does not exist. Press officers and semi-spin doctors often come from the
ranks of journalists and use their good relationship with them, but their framing
strategies might be hindered by the competitive media and party environment, and
the lack of negative campaigning. The short adversarial eruption during ‘the year of
Fortuyn’seems to have been more an exception than a new rule.

CONCLUSIONS
With the government and, up to a point, with political parties we notice an increasing
professionalisation of political communication since the end of pillarisation,
accommodation and media’s partisan logic. Indications are to be found in the growing
number of people employed in communication and with providing information to
both the public and the press, and in their higher educational level. The difference
between government and parties, however, is that the former, since the 1970s, has had
the means to invest in the necessary apparatus, while the latter were confronted with
declining membership and stagnating funds.

Professionalisation of government communication is thus further ahead than that of
political parties. For the former, it is not the financial means that limit its expansion, but
the professional ethics of the (older?) generations of information officers. Even now, the
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
majority of directors of communication object to the Anglo-Saxon style of influencing
the press. Political parties, on the other hand, follow the developments in the US with
intense interest. During every presidential campaign, Dutch campaign managers travel
to the US to see and study the Republican and Democratic strategies at close range. In
the last couple of years the contacts between the Dutch and the UK Labour party has
also intensified. But all this does not allow for talk of an (Anglo-) Americanisation of
Dutch political communication; at best it is a curious learning, but more like a slow
process of modernisation (cf. Swanson & Mancini, 1996). Most Dutch campaign
professionals are aware that a consensual Dutch political culture hardly accommodates
a face-value adoption of a more adversarial US and UK campaign practice. In spite of
Fortuyn’s tone and style in 2002, negative campaigning and attack ads are still –
judging from the 2003 campaign – not done.

A beginning of centralisation is another feature observable in both government and
political parties.At first there was a streamlining within the ministries, but in the last ten
years coordination between the ministries has become more important, strongly
propagated, and influenced by the national communication and information service,
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