Campaign Professionals: party officials and the professionalisation of Australian politics

Abstract

Australian political parties and election campaigns are often said to have become professionalised, yet the term lacks clear definition and the nature of professionalisation as a process of institutional change is poorly articulated. This thesis elaborates the nature, the timing and the drivers of the changes in Australian elections and political parties, principally through depth interviews with present and former officials of the two major Australian political parties, who occupy the important but long neglected third face in Katz and Mair’s model of political parties. The interview data reveal the distinctive identity of party officials as ‘campaign professionals’, and provide a robust definition of professionalism in a party context: the officials are paid, they have high levels of technical competence, and they are devoted as partisans to the electoral interests of their client, the party. The interviews also provide new evidence about professionalisation as a process of institutional change. The national party officials are central to this process, creating a professional campaign model through centralising campaign authority in their own hands at the expense of state branches and, at times, of the party leaders; through taking responsibility for developing and implementing campaign strategies; and through acquiring the financial and other resources necessary to sustain this new style of campaigning. Over a three-phase process of professionalisation – identified as an emergent phase (from 1945 to 1972), an intensification phase (1973 – 2000) and a phase of diversification and deadlock (from 2001) - this model has come to dominate Australian party campaigning. Political parties are in some senses increasingly embattled, with radically declining party membership, a weakened linkage role, and increased electoral volatility. But in other respects as this thesis demonstrates, their campaigning capacities, with their campaig n professionals as central agents, continue to become better! resourc ed and they remain strongly entrenched and empowered in Australian elections.