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PROFESSIONALISATION OF POLITICS IN GERMANY | 67

strictly balanced but bloodless reporting in order to avoid being accused of slant and
possibly affecting the outcome of elections.In the case of the CDU/CSU,this also had an
impact on their media policy. The party increased its efforts to allow commercial
broadcasters to enter the market.

Even at that time, the engagement of outside expertise for campaigning was not new
in Germany. Since the first post-war election in 1949 the major parties had worked with
agencies, which were mainly hired for designing the advertising material, or with
market research institutes, which took care of the polling. Gradually, parties started to
work with more than one or two agencies: a differentiation process that was speeded
up when television began to take the leading role in election campaigns. In 1976, the
CDU hired six agencies for different parts of the campaign. Survey research was also
used to develop the party’s controversial slogan ‘freedom instead of socialism’, and to
test the acceptance of candidate posters for their chancellor candidate, Helmut Kohl. In
the same year, Kohl engaged the Director General of the Austrian public television
channel ORF,Gerd Bacher,as his personal campaign adviser,which can also be regarded
as an indicator for the increasing focus on individual candidates.

Some of the parties established long-term cooperation with certain advertising
agencies. These were usually agencies that did not have a special profile for political
advertising.Parties were clients just like any other company.With elections only coming
up every four years and Bundestag elections being the only national elections besides
the European Election, the German political system does not provide enough of a basis
for the emergence of agencies that specialise in political advertising. Länder elections,
let alone community elections, both held every four to five years, also do not guarantee
a steady and by no means a big income for the agencies, because the regional units
than
have less money available for campaigning then the national party organisation.
While outside expertise underwent specialisation, parties at the same time tended to
centralise their campaign organisation. For the first time in 1965, the SPD concentrated
their campaign management on just a few people to make the decision process more
effective. However, although more and more campaign tasks were delegated to outside
marketing experts, the main responsibility for the whole campaign stayed with the
parties and their campaign managers.

CAMPAIGNING UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE DUAL BROADCASTING SYSTEM Professionalisation of Politics in Germany
While political communication during the 1970s gradually took into account that
television had taken the lead among the mass media and started to adapt to its logic,
the late 1980s saw another turning point. Although commercial television went on air
in 1984, it only started to play a role for election campaigning in the 1990s. When,
during the 1989 European Election campaign, party ads appeared on commercial
channels, the Länder, which have the legislative competence for broadcasting in
Germany, realised that they had forgotten to regulate electoral advertising on 69