The central theme of this PS symposium is that political consultants are important in politics, that they have an impact on campaigns and elections. This is not news to political consultants or candidates running for office. Candidates and consultants know they need each other and the rapid growth and diversification of the profession reveals that sense of interdependence (see Thurber 1995). Though professional political consulting outside of political party organizations has been around since the 1930s, it has only recently sparked interest among political scientists. Why have consultants been ignored by political scientists? Why have consultants ignored political scientists (see Thurber and Nelson 1995)? Why is there little or no theory related to political consultants? Why do we know so little about the profession of political consultants? What subfield houses the study of political consulting: elections and voting behavior, political parties, political communications, political advertising, campaign management?

Political scientists have studied campaigns, elections, and political parties from a variety of views and methodologies, but few have focused on political consultants and their influence. Political campaigns are efforts to win elections to public office by informing the voters of a candidate's issue positions, by persuading the electorate to vote for a candidate, by activating partisans, and by mobilizing supporters. Election campaigns are combats over ideas and ways to persuade groups of voters to support those ideas. Studies have treated campaigns as symbolic events, as propaganda activities with the power to change voter preferences, and as a determinant variable in elections, but there is little consensus among political scientists about the role consultants play in campaigns.

The unrepresentativeness of the U.S. House of Representatives–in terms of ethnicity, gender, race, and socioeconomic status—and its nearly closed system for election have generated questions about the legitimacy and authority of the House as an institution which “represents’ citizens and whether the membership of the House should reflect the citizenry at-large. The articles collected for this symposium offer answers to some of these questions.

Professional political consultants have acquired a mythic ability to single-handedly deliver victory for their client-candidates. Yet, among political scientists, factors other than consultant use appear to explain the difference between electoral success and failure. To this point, however, little quantitative work has been done to measure the impact political consultants have on American elections. In this article I will examine the relative influence political consultants and financial support from the political parties can have upon U.S. House elections.

Definitions and Data

For my purposes, a political consultant is anyone who worked in two or more congressional and/or statewide campaigns during the most recent campaign cycle, was among the highest grossing consultants in his/her field, or was a member of the American Association of Political Consultants. This operationalization is based on Larry Sabato's definition of a political consultant as “a campaign professional who is engaged primarily in the provision of advice and services (such as polling, media creation and production, and directmail fundraising) to candidates, their campaigns, and other political committees.” Noting that not every campaign staffer who is paid for his/her work qualifies as a consultant, Sabato narrowed the category of professional political consultants to “the relatively small and elite corps of interstate political consultants who usually work on many campaigns simultaneously and have served hundreds of campaigns in their careers” (1981, 8). The operational definition employed here focuses attention on only those campaign operatives who are “political consultants” in the most meaningful sense of the phrase.

Most observers of the United States House of Representatives undoubtedly agree that in many respects, large and small, the House does not perform its representative function very well. Not being an expert on the details and intricacies of House operations, I shall leave the smaller matters—such as incremental steps to reform the financing of election campaigns—to the specialists. Let me focus instead on three major characteristics that makes the House insufficiently representative: (1) its election by plurality, which does not provide adequate representation for minorities and minority views; (2) its election by an unrepresentative electorate, especially in midterm elections when only about one-third of the eligible voters make use of their right to vote; and (3) its comparatively small size of only 435 members.

Monarchy has been the predominant form of governance throughout recorded history, and its hegemony extended well into the twentieth century. On the eve of World War I, only four nations in Europe, and none of any consequence (France, Portugal, San Marino, and Switzerland), were not monarchies. Today, however, democracy reigns, and monarchs are widely seen, in the words of the American writer Austin O'Malley, as “a vermiform appendix: useless when quiet; when obtrusive, in danger of removal” (quoted in Esar 1962, 140), or even as the capstone of a sinister conspiracy. “The Royal Family stands at the pinnacle of the class system, and its wealth is linked to the creation of poverty and need,” charges British Marxist Mark Kirby (1998, 37). For antimonarchists, the crown is not only a symbol but also a source of centuries-old class domination, social injustice, and imperialism, a wasteful frippery at best (Came 1998) and a malignant atavism at worst (Nairn 1994).

Thus, the forces of blond egalitarianism have humbled the Nordic royalty by replacing their horse-drawn carriages with bicycles, and the British have reduced their nobility to guiding hordes of T-shirted, gumsnapping American tourists through their ancestral homes in order to make ends meet. In Australia, “progressive” forces have succeeded in scheduling a referendum in 1999 on whether the current head of state, Queen Elizabeth, should be replaced by an illustrious Australian—if one can be found.

Though an endangered species, monarchs are by no means extinct.

Political consultants are seen as influential actors in American politics who may effect policy long after their service on an election has concluded. Many observers of the consulting industry (see, for example, Shea 1996; Sabato 1981) have suggested that the use of political consultants has been especially bad for political parties, contributing to their decline. Proponents of the party decline thesis maintain that consultants weaken parties by giving candidates independent support bases for conducting their campaigns, creating a campaign climate where individual candidates take the voting public's focus away from party platforms. But consultants have become prominent because the parties cannot always offer up-to-date technical services and close attention to local situations. Some political scientists suggest that political consultants can assist parties in attaining their goals by providing the highly professional and technical services to party candidates that party organizations themselves cannot (Luntz 1988). Further, political consultants tend to work in concert with political parties because they depend on the parties for a supply of clients (Sabato 1981; Luntz 1988). Here we explore another dimension of the consultant-political party relationship: the role political parties play in training political consultants. We hypothesize that contemporary political consultants are likely to have had close links (such as prior employment) with a political party since the 1970s, when parties began adopting new technologies and training their employees to use them.

Consultant background vis-a-vis political parties can lead to two very different notions of the effect of consultant activity on our politics.