The central theme of this PS symposium is that political consultants are important in politics, that they have an impact on campaigns and elections. This is not news to political consultants or candidates running for office. Candidates and consultants know they need each other and the rapid growth and diversification of the profession reveals that sense of interdependence (see Thurber 1995). Though professional political consulting outside of political party organizations has been around since the 1930s, it has only recently sparked interest among political scientists. Why have consultants been ignored by political scientists? Why have consultants ignored political scientists (see Thurber and Nelson 1995)? Why is there little or no theory related to political consultants? Why do we know so little about the profession of political consultants? What subfield houses the study of political consulting: elections and voting behavior, political parties, political communications, political advertising, campaign management?

Political scientists have studied campaigns, elections, and political parties from a variety of views and methodologies, but few have focused on political consultants and their influence. Political campaigns are efforts to win elections to public office by informing the voters of a candidate's issue positions, by persuading the electorate to vote for a candidate, by activating partisans, and by mobilizing supporters. Election campaigns are combats over ideas and ways to persuade groups of voters to support those ideas. Studies have treated campaigns as symbolic events, as propaganda activities with the power to change voter preferences, and as a determinant variable in elections, but there is little consensus among political scientists about the role consultants play in campaigns.

Professional political consultants have acquired a mythic ability to single-handedly deliver victory for their client-candidates. Yet, among political scientists, factors other than consultant use appear to explain the difference between electoral success and failure. To this point, however, little quantitative work has been done to measure the impact political consultants have on American elections. In this article I will examine the relative influence political consultants and financial support from the political parties can have upon U.S. House elections.

Definitions and Data

For my purposes, a political consultant is anyone who worked in two or more congressional and/or statewide campaigns during the most recent campaign cycle, was among the highest grossing consultants in his/her field, or was a member of the American Association of Political Consultants. This operationalization is based on Larry Sabato's definition of a political consultant as “a campaign professional who is engaged primarily in the provision of advice and services (such as polling, media creation and production, and directmail fundraising) to candidates, their campaigns, and other political committees.” Noting that not every campaign staffer who is paid for his/her work qualifies as a consultant, Sabato narrowed the category of professional political consultants to “the relatively small and elite corps of interstate political consultants who usually work on many campaigns simultaneously and have served hundreds of campaigns in their careers” (1981, 8). The operational definition employed here focuses attention on only those campaign operatives who are “political consultants” in the most meaningful sense of the phrase.

Political consultants are seen as influential actors in American politics who may effect policy long after their service on an election has concluded. Many observers of the consulting industry (see, for example, Shea 1996; Sabato 1981) have suggested that the use of political consultants has been especially bad for political parties, contributing to their decline. Proponents of the party decline thesis maintain that consultants weaken parties by giving candidates independent support bases for conducting their campaigns, creating a campaign climate where individual candidates take the voting public's focus away from party platforms. But consultants have become prominent because the parties cannot always offer up-to-date technical services and close attention to local situations. Some political scientists suggest that political consultants can assist parties in attaining their goals by providing the highly professional and technical services to party candidates that party organizations themselves cannot (Luntz 1988). Further, political consultants tend to work in concert with political parties because they depend on the parties for a supply of clients (Sabato 1981; Luntz 1988). Here we explore another dimension of the consultant-political party relationship: the role political parties play in training political consultants. We hypothesize that contemporary political consultants are likely to have had close links (such as prior employment) with a political party since the 1970s, when parties began adopting new technologies and training their employees to use them.

Consultant background vis-a-vis political parties can lead to two very different notions of the effect of consultant activity on our politics.

Proponents of direct legislation maintain that the initiative and popular referendum empower ordinary citizens to set the agenda of politics. Some argue it shifts “ultimate authority from representatives in state legislatures, city councils, and even Congress to the people themselves” (Schmidt 1989, vii). Such elections, so the argument goes, produce greater voter interest in elections and higher voter turnout. Those in favor of the process also contend that it is an important check on special interests which exert too much control over elected politicians (Magleby 1984, chap. 2; Cronin 1989).

Critics of direct democracy raise concerns about the quality of deliberation voters give to issues. Voters can be confused by ballot question wording or respond negatively to the length of the ballots. Moreover, because voters lack the simplifying devices of partisanship and candidate appeal, they may be more susceptible to the manipulations of campaign consultants.

How well do these longstanding arguments for and against direct legislation reflect our actual experience with the process in the 1990s? Arguments for direct democracy depend largely on how the process is conducted. If the process can be manipulated by special interests or relies on questionable tactics, then many of the advantages claimed for the process disappear. In this article, we argue that political consultants play a significant role in the conduct of direct democracy. These consultants normally work directly for organized interests without the constraints imposed by candidates or parties.

The work of campaign consultants in elections outside of their countries of origin is a relatively recent phenomenon. Joe Napolitan is credited as becoming the first international consultant in modern times when, in 1969, he worked on the successful reelection bid of Ferdinand Marcos. As recently as 1972, Napolitan wrote of a certain reticence in some countries toward using non-native campaign consultants A decade later, Larry Sabato (1981) saw evidence that use of non-native consultants was becoming a more accepted practice in campaigns worldwide. By the end of the 1990s, according to David Swanson and Paolo Mancini (1996), consultants from the U.S., Germany, France, and Britain were becoming increasingly active in elections outside their own countries. Since the use of non-native campaign consultants is likely to increase into the forseeable future, I would like to use this article to set forth the beginnings of a research agenda, to present an outline of a project worth pursuing, for determining how and why foreign consultants are being, can be, or should be used. The article has three parts. First, I present an overview, based on available evidence, of the nature of overseas work by campaign consultants. Second, I explore some possible explanations for the rise of this phenomenon. Third, I assess the main institutional factors affecting the internationalization of consultancy.

Some political leadership styles are of a piece. Jimmy Carter's is a case in point. Both in the comments he privately jotted on the margins of memos from his aides and in his public discourse, Carter exhibited a common concern for detail and insistence on the correctness of his own positions. Other styles are layered, as in that of Dwight Eisenhower, whose apoliltical public demeanor concealed an analytically detached political sophisticate who obtained results by indirection (Greenstein 1982).

The political style of President Bill Clinton is neither unitary nor layered. It alternates. The tempest over whether Clinton was involved in a dalliance with a White House intern is a reminder of his tendency to oscillate between an uninhibited, anything-goes approach to leadership and a more measured operating mode in which he sets attainable goals and proceeds skillfully in his efforts to realize them.

The pattern is recurrent. After his election as governor of Arkansas in 1978, Clinton instituted a substantial increase in automobile licensing fees, peopled his administration with bearded political activists, and otherwise failed to conform to the political mores of his state. As a result, he was voted out of office two years later. He then spent the next two years stumping the state and promising to remedy his ways. He was returned to office, serving from 1983 to 1993 and establishing a reputation as a pragmatic and effective state executive (Maraniss 1995).

The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, public opinion is initially responsive to media reports of scandal, the public's concern with actual political achievement reasserts itself. This lesson, which was not nearly so clear before the Lewinsky matter as it is now, not only deepens our understanding of American politics. It also tends, as I argue in the second half of this article, to undermine the importance of one large branch of public opinion research, buttress the importance of another, and point toward some new research questions.

Whatever else may have transpired by the time this article gets into print, the Lewinsky poll bounce is something worth pondering. In a half-dozen commercial polls taken in the period just before the story broke, Clinton's job approval rating averaged about 60%. Ten days later, following intensive coverage of the story and Clinton's State of the Union address, presidential support was about 10 percentage points higher.

For more than 25 years, my colleagues and I have been developing and applying an unofficial, academically based, third-party approach to the analysis and resolution of international and ethnic conflicts, which I have come to call interactive problem solving. The approach is derived from the seminal work of John Burton (see Burton 1969, 1979, 1984; Kelman 1972). It is anchored in social-psychological principles and follows a scholar/practitioner model. Our practice is informed by theoretical analyses and empirical studies of international conflict, social influence, and group interaction. The experience gained in practice, in turn, contributes to theory building and to the evaluation and refinement of our intervention model. The work thus represents an integration and continuing interaction between practice, research, and theory building.

The fullest—in a sense, the paradigmatic—application of the approach is represented by problem-solving workshops, which bring together politically influential members of conflicting parties in a private, confidential setting for direct, noncommittal communication. Workshops are designed to enable the parties to explore each other's perspective and, through a joint process of creative problem solving, to generate new ideas for mutually satisfactory solutions to their conflict. The ultimate goal is to transfer the insights and ideas gained from these interactions into the political debate and decision-making processes in the two communities.

Problem-solving workshops are not negotiating sessions and they are not intended to simulate and certainly not to substitute for official negotiations.