| Abstract: | The process of economic transnationalization and liberalization that has accelerated in recent years has a corollary in the political sphere. One of the political areas that has been transformed under neoliberalism is the organization and management of election campaigns. Political consultants from the United States and other leading industrialized states have been hired as campaign managers or experts in elections held in Russia, Israel, Britain, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, and a host of other countries. Part of this newly transnationalized electioneering mode involves the employment of specialists from the commercial sector who are skilled in the use of new communication and information/media technologies and techniques and in modern fund-raising methods. Encouraged and supported by increasing corporate financing, campaign managers have begun to standardize and make greater media spectacles of the process of electing a nation's political representatives, using campaigning styles and procedures that largely originated in the United States. A weakening of political parties and citizen activism in the formal political process and a deemphasis on major governing issues are among the changes observed, along with greater attention given to voter surveillance and profiling, opposition research, focus groups and polling, symbolic manipulation, and media-oriented construction of candidate personalities. |
