Packaging Democracy: How Campaign Professionals Reproduce Political Inequality

This dissertation is a study of the specialized production of electoral politics. I examine the social origins, career paths and perspectives of the hired professionals who craft the strategies, messages, and images of national-level campaigns. These "politicos" compete for positions within an ever-changing landscape of consulting firms, party committees, and short-lived campaign organizations. They have a profound influence both on the content of American politics and on politicians themselves, yet they have never been studied, other than anecdotally./nThis is the first comprehensive study of the social structure, dispositions, and strategies of the full array of workers--not only consultants, but also campaign staff and advisors--who produce national-level political campaigns. I find that the structure and culture of professional campaign work magnify existing inequalities in democratic participation, both inside and outside the field of political production. Among political operatives, entry-level jobs on national campaigns are the best and often only viable starting point for a path to higher-level work, but these positions are nearly impossible to access for those without political connections and/or financial resources. This creates a first filter of selection and vector of inequality according to class, ethnicity, gender and age. Next, because any individual's contribution to an electoral outcome is nearly unknowable (as my interviewees attested), an individual rises in this field not because her campaigns win or lose, but by the extent to which candidates and other "politicos" believe she has the skills and the "political instincts" to succeed. Hiring practices are informal and referral-based, which further limits access to these powerful positions for those without the effective capitals or dispositions. As a result, the top levels of the campaign profession have even less ethnic and gender diversity than does Congress./nThis inequality of access to positions in the space of political production combines with other features of internal electoral organization to produce campaign strategies disliked by both scholars concerned with good democratic practice and potential voters. For example, many of my interviewees talked about the incentives for "cookie-cutter campaigning"--reproducing strategies, tactics, and even slogans across elections. In Chapter 4, I use multiple correspondence analysis to show that the "top" consultants--those who work on the greatest numbers of high-level races and are in a position to hire, judge, mentor and socialize newer campaign professionals--are the most likely to find it acceptable to use misleading tactics or to deliberately decrease turnout, and are the least worried about these tactics' affects on voter cynicism. These kinds of campaign content, along with the sense that politics is "too complicated" or that politicians are not concerned with "regular people," have been shown in other studies to lower political participation./nIn this dissertation, I bring together Bourdieu's and others' analyses of cultural fields with political science and sociology, approaching the world of electoral politics as a "field of cultural production" rather than only as a site of competition over interests or a simple vehicle for domination. People have practical, tacit relations to political messages and images, just as they do with any other kind of cultural product. These dispositions are formed through family, schooling, and work, and are thus deeply tied to class, gender, race, ethnicity/nationality and other principles of classification and forms of inequality. This is true for the people who produce political content (such as skilled professionals of electoral campaigns) as well as for potential voters. This research, then, focuses on the "supply side" of electoral politics, the intersection between the field of cultural production and the political field which I will call the "field of political production." Examining this field of political production--the trajectories, contests, categorizations, and desires of the producers who design, direct and distribute campaign materials--contributes to understanding how and why campaign specialists make the choices they do.

Advisor: Hout, Michael
Wacquant, Loic