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POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN THE ERA OF PROFESSIONALISATION | 15

persuade and mobilise voters, and so on. Furthermore, in a situation where citizens
have become less supportive of political parties,less trusting of the political system and
more likely to abstain, there is likely to be a greater incentive to employ those skilled in
the arts of communication and marketing – the ‘professional’ consultants,
communicators and organisers – to help the political parties to position themselves in
the minds of the citizen/ voter.

The triumph of media logic
Although political parties have always sought to use new technologies and
communication systems to improve their electoral chances, the decline of their
traditional positions within the political process – e.g.voters are no longer ‘aligned’,they
no longer have access to their ‘own’ media – has made them even more dependent on
the media and communication practitioners that lie outside their immediate control.
Therefore parties have been forced to become more centralised in order to take
advantage of media opportunities, i.e. propagating agreed key messages, and not to be
caught out by the media, e.g. allowing dissenting voices. Parties have, in effect, learned
the importance of the media and the need to deal with,and confront,the ‘media’s logic’.

All chapters note that the media have come to play an increasingly central role in day-
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to-day politics. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, ‘Sua Emittenza’ has become the prime-minister
to-day politics. In Italy, Silvio Belusconi,‘Sua Emittenza’ has become the prime-minister;
in Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder became known as the ‘media chancellor’; in
the Netherlands, the late populist politician Pim Fortuyn, had increased his popularity
by using the magnifying glass of television for his adversarial tone, style and culture.
Politicians are constantly under pressure to adapt to new technologies in their attempt
to improve their communication strategies. Similar examples regarding the impact of
‘media logic’over politics can also be seen in most European countries.

It is not a coincidence that during every presidential campaign European media and
campaign consultants, as well as political executives travel, to the US to see and study
the Republican and Democratic strategies at close range, since ‘media logic’ has
strongly influenced the behaviour of party politicians. In the same way, American
political consultants are very often employed in European election contests: Stanley
Greenberg was one of the major consultants for Rutelli, Berlusconi’s challenger in 2001;
Dick Morris has travelled across Europe offering advice; James Carville has also been Political Communication in the Era of Professionalisation
involved in campaigning, as has Joe Napolitan, who offered advice to the Labour Party
in 1997 (Gould, 1998), and so on. More recently, in 2004 the British Conservative Party
turned to Australian experts to help it fight the British general election. More generally,
the introduction of television from the 1950s onwards has transformed the nature of
election campaigning and the relationship between politicians, political parties and
publics.The reliance on the ‘modern publicity campaign’(Blumler, 1990) has also altered
the relationship between traditional party members and the political party apparatus,
at the same time as transforming the ‘traditional’ campaigns into media campaigns
(Mazzoleni & Schultz, 1999, p. 257). Furthermore, the increasingly sophisticated use of 17