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84 | THE PROFESSIONALISM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

So even if political parties cannot be involved in direct communication activities in
television, they certainly need both professional skills and financial resources in the
field of news management. The need to utilise free media to maintain voters’ support
thus becomes a daily priority of government and party workers.

When it comes to changes in communication practices at the party level, these can be
examined both by analysing the people working with communication within the party
organisations and the techniques used by the parties in their communication activities.
In both these aspects, Sweden has been traditionally viewed as a typical multi-party
democracy with a proportional electoral system, where voting was mainly class-based
and predictable and in which party meetings dominated campaign activities.

However, some reviews of Swedish party practices over the last few decades have
shown signs of change. They indicated a greater interest in conducting opinion polls
and developing media strategies, even if these changes were small and not evidence of
a complete modernisation or ‘Americanisation’ of political communication practices.
Instead, national characteristics seemed to co-exist with some adoption of international
trends (Asp & Esaiasson,1996; Petersson & Holmberg,1998; Nord,2001a).

To analyse the recent development in this area a set of qualitative interviews with
political party officials was conducted in 2002 and 2003 by CPRC, Centre for Political
Communication Research (Nord & Strömbäck, 2003; Nord 2004). Representatives from
all seven parties in parliament were interviewed and asked about their communication
practices.

THE PARTY IS OVER, OR IS IT?
The results of the interviews confirm that the political parties in Sweden are slowly
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
adapting to new communication practices, as there are more people working with such
activities than previously, and there are now more opinion polls and focus groups
conducted. In general, all the political parties now behave in a similar manner. About
ten years ago, only the biggest parties with huge resources admitted to some use of
opinion polls and media strategies, while the other parties denied any use of such
communication practices. The number of people working with PR and media-related
activities also varied significantly (Petersson & Holmberg, 1998). Today, all party
representatives confirm their use of marketing techniques and admit the need for
professional skills in this field.Although Swedish political parties are still to some extent
driven by ideological compassion and issue-orientation, more political marketing
considerations are becoming obvious within the existing party communication
strategies.

The overall figures concerning party employees, however, shows a general decrease of
party officials between 1993 and 2003 (Table 2). But this trend is more evidence of
centralisation than of demobilisation of the political parties. Most of the party jobs that
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