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POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN THE ERA OF PROFESSIONALISATION | 19

the candidate standing for the party.Tradition has it that the individual candidate as an
individual standing in a constituency does not affect the vote, and often candidates see
themselves as ‘legal necessities’ for the furtherance of the aims and objectives of the
political parties. However, there is now more attention devoted to individual
constituency campaigning in the belief that the greater the level of activity – the larger
the turnout and, hence, the possibility of altering the pattern of votes cast. Individual
candidates, as individuals, are nevertheless less important than the party as a whole
unless, of course, they have a high profile, e.g. if they are television personalities or well-
known and very established political figures.

In either case it seems to be an incremental process for individual candidates to use
professional practices. For example, as in the case of Greece, the party announces the
list of candidate MPs, but those who will be elected for a seat in the Parliament depend
on the preferences of the voters. The voters put a cross on the candidates they prefer
from the party list on Election Day. This forces candidates of the same party to seek
individual votes from the voters who vote for their party. Consequently, they also have
to use media professionals in order to raise their profile and to get media publicity in
the national or local media. In this respect they have to spend money concerning their
own individual campaign. Some spend money on preparing leaflets, media material,
creating their own website and organising meetings, in order to have a presence in the
media.

By and large, professionalisation gradually takes place both at the national and at the
local levels, but in either case more often during the election campaign period.We can,
therefore,identify three main trends of electoral systems that affect professionalisation:

In pure proportional systems we can identify a stronger centralisation of political
parties that favours the professionalisation of the central party machine.

In majoritarian systems, one can see that the professionalisation of political
communication develops at both the party headquarters that are responsible for the
whole campaigning at a national level and at a constituency level, since local
candidates have to compete against their counterparts in order to be elected,
irrespective of the total numbers of votes cast for their party at the national level. Political Communication in the Era of Professionalisation

In some proportional systems, as in Greece, there is also competition between the
candidates from within the same party. In this case the professionalisation of political
communication could be identified at both the central as well as at the municipal
levels. Other political systems have different features.The German electoral system, that
is the ‘German Model’,has some unique characteristics:it is a proportional system with a
personalised element. Voters have two votes. One goes to a party, the other to a
regional candidate. The party vote, however, is the more important vote because the
percentage of votes an individual party gets in the country as a whole decides the 21