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contested if it were not for the slick professionals who manage to persuade people that
this is what they want.

The tentative conclusion may be that professional political communication tends to
obscure the distribution and execution of real power in society.

CONCLUSION
The preceding national analyses of professionalisation of political communication show
that this is a process that – at least in Europe – is rather different from other similar
processes in disciplines such as law, medicine or journalism. Professionalisation is
usually a social process in which groups of people who are engaged in specific
activities that demand a level of expertise become a professional group when they
begin to demand a level of legal protection for the independent execution of those
activities, and a measure of societal respect for their expert status. Part of the process of
becoming recognised ‘professionals’ is that associations of experts are established that
adopt codes of conduct for their members. These professional codes serve the
distinction between genuine professional and con-artists and they offer a platform for
public accountability. In the US one finds the American Association of Political
Consultants that has a code of professional ethics (www.theaapc.org/ethics), but there
is no European equivalent.The professional political communicator in Europe remains a
somewhat haphazardly operating expert without clear ethical rules and without a
clearly defined public accountability.

However, the professionals are prominently present in today’s European political arena
and our question remains what they do to ‘the democratic quality of the polity’.This can
only be answered if we make a normative choice about the operational definition of
democratic quality. It could be argued that this is a choice between the prevailing
model of liberal, representative democracy (‘thin democracy’ as Barber (1984) calls it)
and a robust participatory democracy (‘strong democracy’according to Barber).

Taking together the tentative conclusions above, there is sufficient evidence to argue The Professionalisation of Political Communication: Democracy at Stake?
that the current process of professionalisation of political communication reinforces
across European countries an elitist, representative liberal conception of democracy
(‘thin democracy’), whereas this process does little to assist the development of strong,
participatory,deliberative democracy.

In terms of ‘making things better’ the professionalisation of political communication
can reasonably be expected to contribute to the democratic quality of the polity, but
within the framework of the limited democracy model. Professionalisation would seem
to provide an important contribution to the functioning and the legitimation of liberal
representative democracy with the proviso that it does not seem to be competent to
cope with some basic troubles that haunt this democratic model: little or no civic
confidence, and little or no civic engagement. But then, to some extent, this is not a real 185