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The Effectiveness of the Political Consultant as a Campaign Resource

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Stephen K. Medvic
Stephen K. Medvic*
Affiliation:
Old Dominion University
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 150 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1998

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Footnotes

*

This paper builds on an earlier project on political consultants that was supported by a Goldsmith Research Award from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and a grant from the Purdue Research Foundation.

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