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commercial channels, which was done at the next opportunity. Nevertheless, Germany
then became one of only a few West European countries that allowed parties to
purchase broadcasting time for their political advertising on commercial channels in
addition to the free slots that parties get on public television. The following elections
showed that only the bigger parties were able to pay for additional advertising time.
This finally torpedoed the principle of equal opportunity for all parties, which the
Constitutional Court always insisted upon, but was in fact already called into question
by graded allocation of advertising time to parties according to their strength.Thus, the
emergence of commercial channels offered new and less restricted outlets for party
advertising but to the disadvantage of smaller parties (for a general overview, Holtz-
Bacha,2001).

Only in 1994 did campaigners and commercial channels actually come closer to each
other. Parties reckoned on commercial television and the commercial channels
themselves started to pay attention to the campaign. It took until the election of 1998
for the new conditions of the dual broadcasting system to really have an effect on how
the campaigns were designed: The trend to personalisation and entertainisation
seemed to be the obvious consequence of the commercialised market. Yet another
challenge was the Internet, which established itself as a campaign channel at about the
same time and provided for another medium to address voters directly.

The 1998 campaign was soon characterised as being different from the campaigns
before. Americanisation was the keyword of public discussion, and for several reasons
Americanisation was particularly diagnosed for the SPD campaign. In fact, the style of
the campaign became an important issue as it unfolded. However, looking back at
earlier campaigns, this was by no means the first time that Americanisation had been
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
diagnosed in Germany but had in fact been repeated again and again since the
election in 1961 when Willy Brandt, running as the chancellor candidate of the SPD,
adopted features of the 1960 Kennedy campaign (cf. Lieske, 2003). Nevertheless,
scientific observers had the impression that another stage of professionalisation was
reached in 1998 where nothing was actually new but everything was a little more
sophisticated than before. The dominant features of the campaign were centralisation
and specialisation,personalisation,and entertainisation.

Centralisation and specialisation were demonstrated at their best by the SPD’s
campaign headquarters Kampa.The Kampa was set up as a central unit along the lines
of Clinton’s War Room in the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, as well as of Blair’s
campaign headquarters during the 1997 British general election. The party’s executive
manager, Franz Müntefering, together with his chief of staff, Mathias Machnig, headed
the Kampa, working there with a team of about 70 mostly young people. About two
thirds of them came from inside the party, the others being professional marketers
from outside. The SPD sought advice from U.S. and British experts for the organisation
of the campaign headquarters, as well as for the campaign in general. SPD
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