Page 124 - The Professionalisation of Political Communication Chaning Media, Changing Europe Volume 3

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POLITICAL PROFESSIONALISM IN ITALY | 121

highly specialised personnel coming from business and other fields (e.g. academics)
outside the political realm.

A second diffused professionalised practice is the support for single, local candidates
given by different professionals in the communication field.Their support is essentially
limited to technical duties and does not imply, up to now, specific and specialised
competencies in the field of political communication. As we have seen, professionals
who are involved in the campaign are printers, graphic designers, photographers. It is
hard to define these people as ‘political professionals’: their skills refer to different fields
of communication without any specificity in politics. In part, the low level of
professionalism is caused by the little money that candidates have: after Tangentopoli a
stricter law has been approved that makes it harder for candidates to provide
themselves with other money beyond what they can get from the State, once they are
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elected. More rarely,beyond this technical support,there is also a more elaborated one
that touches the strategic decisions of the campaign. In this case pollsters, public
relations people and journalists are involved. So far this is not very diffused, even if, as
we shall see, in the future this kind of professional involvement may become more
important.

The old political professionalism has only partially been substituted by a new political
communication professionalism. Beyond the traditional party bureaucrats who still
exist, even if in small numbers, there are many people working at a professional level in
politics and they come from the mass media field.Up to now they seem to miss some of
the major features that Webb and Fisher have stressed as being part of the definition of
profession (Webb & Fisher, 2003): in most cases their expertise is essentially technical,
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doesn’t reflect any formal training and it is not particular to the political field. When
they have a more developed expertise, they lack the autonomy and the self regulatory
capacity that defines the idea of profession.

The distinction we have made so far can be approached in a different way. The ‘semi-
professional field’, as it has been called by some journalists (Cattaneo & Zanetto, 2003),
that one can observe in Italy is articulated in three kinds of figures. First of all there is
what could be seen as the ‘Berlusconi professionalism’, a sort of professionalism that
seems entirely connected to the national context and that is hardly visible in other
countries. This is the professionalism that Berlusconi took from his own firms and
transferred into the newly established party structure. It is made up of people skilled in
polling and advertising. ‘Berlusconi professionalism’ also identifies individual political
figures who come from the same television and advertising firms that Berlusconi owns Political Professionalism in Italy
and who, therefore, are themselves particularly skilled in communication and are
sensitive to the needs coming from this area.

A second kind of political communication professionalism is made up by those Farrel
and colleagues call ‘marketers’ (Farrel, Kolodny & Medvic, 2001): these are professionals 123