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Political Consultancy Overseas: The Internationalization of Campaign Consultancy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

David M. Farrell*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester

Extract

The work of campaign consultants in elections outside of their countries of origin is a relatively recent phenomenon. Joe Napolitan is credited as becoming the first international consultant in modern times when, in 1969, he worked on the successful reelection bid of Ferdinand Marcos. As recently as 1972, Napolitan wrote of a certain reticence in some countries toward using non-native campaign consultants A decade later, Larry Sabato (1981) saw evidence that use of non-native consultants was becoming a more accepted practice in campaigns worldwide. By the end of the 1990s, according to David Swanson and Paolo Mancini (1996), consultants from the U.S., Germany, France, and Britain were becoming increasingly active in elections outside their own countries. Since the use of non-native campaign consultants is likely to increase into the forseeable future, I would like to use this article to set forth the beginnings of a research agenda, to present an outline of a project worth pursuing, for determining how and why foreign consultants are being, can be, or should be used. The article has three parts. First, I present an overview, based on available evidence, of the nature of overseas work by campaign consultants. Second, I explore some possible explanations for the rise of this phenomenon. Third, I assess the main institutional factors affecting the internationalization of consultancy.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1998

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Footnotes

*

This article was drafted while I was a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in the spring of 1997. I am grateful to colleagues there for their encouragement, and to the participants at the POP Workshop for helpful feedback.

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