Michael Hout Daniel Laurison University of California, Berkeley
The research studies the role professional campaign staffers and consultants play in American elections. Political operatives create the advertisements and flyers voters see, craft the speeches voters hear, script the phone calls and visits they receive, and determine which voters will be targeted with each of these communications. They shape candidates? messages, their self-presentations, and their daily schedules. Although candidates may have final say, the vast majority of campaign strategies are decided upon and implemented by campaign staff and consultants. And yet scholars know remarkably little about the people who play such an important role in shaping the American political landscape. Specifically, this project looks at the paths to entry and advancement within the political field. The first part of the research involves the creation and analysis of a database containing the career paths of all staffers and consultants who held decision-making responsibilities in Presidential or Senate campaigns between 2003 and 2008. The second part of the project is based on in-depth interviews with a subset of these political professionals in Washington, D.C. and around the country. The intellectual contributions of this dissertation is to understand an understudied area of sociological interest, political work world, that has been investigated neither by scholars of work and professions nor by political sociologists
Broader Impacts
This research has the potential to have broader impacts through shedding light on the mechanisms that govern success in a field that has been historically white and male-dominated. Research findings will advance understanding of the processes American political campaigns within both the field of sociology as well as among the public more broadly.
Motivation/Introduction Professional political operatives are responsible for raising and spending the millions of dollars contemporary national campaigns cost – they create the advertisements voters see on television and the flyers they receive in their mailboxes, craft the speeches voters hear and the phone calls they receive, and determine which voters will be contacted by the campaign in the first place. In short, the role professional campaign staffers and consultants play in elections, and thus in who ultimately holds the power of elected offices, is hard to overstate. And yet, while the effects of campaigns and the biographies of elected officials have both been studied extensively, scholars know remarkably little about the people who create run campaigns and advise politicians. This dissertation describes the ways campaign professionals enter and advance within the field, the kind of knowledge and training they draw on in their work and the ways they judge political competency. It examines the kinds of resources that are most effective for securing positions in national political operations, and brings together types of analysis usually separated into the sub-disciplines of stratification, on the one hand, and political sociology on the other. Understanding the trajectories of agents within the political field and the way they see their work should facilitate a more accurate understanding of the American political process as a whole. This research involved two primary components: collecting information for a dataset including the career biographies of all staff and consultants working on Presidential or contested Senate races from 2004 - 2008 (N>4000), and conducting in-depth interviews with 57 of these politicos. Interviews: Strategic campaign professionals from both parties (34 Democrats and 23 Republicans) and all stages in their careers, from just starting out to nearly retired, agreed to talk with me. One of the most telling features of the interviews was that many political strategists stated (without prompting from me) that campaigns often make little difference to election outcomes; further, nearly all told me that there is no way to know objectively whether any individual political operative is effective at his or her work. Thus, the way they advance in their careers in political work is primarily through making positive impressions on their peers and superiors; this has the potential to lead to campaign strategies and messages that are constrained by consensus among political operatives about what makes for "good politics," and to dis-incentivize innovative or uncommon approaches to voter persuasion. Database: Initial analysis of the database using social network analysis techniques shows that each party has a densely connected group of campaign staff and consultants, and corroborates another theme from the interviews: the importance of social capital. Most people (77% in 2008) involved with a Presidential campaign in a given year had worked with someone else on that campaign at least once before. The people working in the Presidential primary campaigns generally considered most viable during the primaries tended to have the broadest range of connections, while people working in "fringe" campaigns such as Kucinich or Paul's tended to have connections only with one another. I will also look at patterns of how politicos move from one job to another, rather than the connections these moves generate, but have not yet begun that process. Contribution/Conclusion While analysis is ongoing, this dataset is the first and only comprehensive compilation of information about these key players in American politics. These are the people whose beliefs about what voters want translate directly into what voters are given during campaigns. The skills, knowledge, and modes of action deemed valuable by those making hiring decisions in campaigns will affect both who works on campaigns in the first place and the way they carry out that work. Understanding the characteristics of elite politicos and the processes of advancement in the field provides insight into a key factor in American campaigns and elections.
