What About Winning? Looking into the Blind Spot of the Theory of Campaign Professionalization

Abstract

The international literature on campaign professionalization suggests that election campaigning has become increasingly slick and professional in recent decades. But while significant attention has been paid to changing campaign tools and tactics, one critical question has been consistently overlooked: Do professionalized campaigners perform better at the ballot box? This question should be a critical one for campaign scholars, yet the existing literature is almost entirely silent on the relationship between campaign professionalization and electoral outcomes. This paper reviews the existing literature for clues about how professionalized campaigning may help or hinder electoral performance and draws on recent research using Gibson and Rommele’s (2009) CAMPROF Index to identify avenues for further research on this under-examined topic.