Review of an Electoral Campaign: From Chronicle to Political Logic

Abstract

Electoral campaigns have undergone profound change in industrialized countries since the nineteenth century. As Swanson and Mancini (1996¹) have shown, campaigns that were once publicized by the print media have given way to a new form of political communication resulting from the emergence of television in the 1950s. This type of communication is more centralized, undertaken by professionals whose experience qualifies them to do the job, notably in the area of opinion polls. This change was accompanied by the replacement of the short official campaign with a long campaign beginning several months before the election itself. This so-called modern phase in the history of electoral campaigns was clearly the dominant form for a quarter of a century.