Campaigning without candidates

The recent European Council presidential elections were a unique communications case study

 
In recent years, election campaigns have received growing attention from scholars in the fields of political communication and political marketing around the world. Debate performances, media coverage, the role of political advisors, opinion polling – in many western countries all these aspects are studied empirically. As a consequence, our knowledge of political campaigning has grown accordingly. However, this knowledge seems rather useless in explaining the process that preceded the recent election of the first president of the European council. Not only because it was not a classical election by the people (but rather an appointment by colleagues), but also because the basic rules of political campaigning did not apply. On the contrary we witnessed a reversed campaign logic that I will briefly explain with four basic lessons. Special attention will be given to Herman Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime minister and the new ‘Mr Europe’, who proved better in this form of reversed campaigning than his competitors and his Belgian colleagues who failed to win major EU positions in the past.

Peter Van Aelst

Peter Van Aelst is assistant professor of political psychology and political communication at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He wrote a PhD on the role of media in election campaigns and has published in several international journals. His current research focuses on the relations between politicians and journalists in comparative perspective.