Americanisation or modernisation of electoral campaigns

At its simplest, the idea of Americanisation draws attention to the existence of practices that were first developed in the US and that were then adopted into other politics systems and absorbed into political communication practices (Negrine, 2008:152). The term ‘American model’ means “...campaigning in democracies around the world is becoming more and more Americanised as candidates, political parties, and news media take cues from their counterparts in the United States” (Swanson and Mancini, 1996:4). However, there is debate about what ‘American model’ of electoral campaigns really means, as the spread of practices used by the United States, could be due to a number of reasons such as the increase in technology, globalisation, and modernisation. This does not mean that political campaigns are becoming ‘Americanised’ but that they are just doing the things that have proven to provide results for winning elections.

The influence of the internet on political campaigns has been an interesting topic of study since the rise of the internet in the mid 1990s, (Anstead an Chadwick, 2008). Farrell, Kolodny, and Medvic, state that “...the campaign process has passed through three main stages of development...” (Farrell, et all, 2001:12). First, it was campaigns driven by newspaper, then television, and now by the rise of the digital media and technologies political campaigns have taken a whole on a direction. The noticeable internet campaign was the Howard Dean 2004, which showed that there was a new and more efficient way to campaigning by using the technological resources available. From here, political campaigns have transformed considerably, Obama ‘08 for example. The main features of post modern campaigns fall under these three h...

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Norris, P., (2000), A Virtuous Circle: Political Communication in Postindustrial Societies. [Assessed on 2/3/14 - http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~pnorris/Books/Virtuous%20Circle.htm].

Norris, P., (2004), ‘The evolution of election campaigns: Eroding political engagement?’

Smith, C. F., and Webster, W. R., (2004), ‘Members of the Scottish Parliamnet on the Net’ Information Polity, 9:67-80.

Swanson, D. L., and Mancini, P., (1996), Politics, Media, and Modern Democracy: An International Study of Innovations in Electoral Campaigning and Their Consequences (Google eBook) (Greenwood Publishing Group).

The Electoral Commission, (2010), ‘UK general election 2010: Campaign spending report’ http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/109388/2010-UKPGE-Campaign-expenditure-report.pdf [Assessed on 6/3/14].