Rachel K. Gibson and Andrea Römmele, "Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning," Party Politics, 15 (May 2009), 265-293.

First paragraph:
Over the past two decades, a new style of political campaigning has been identified by a range of scholars working in the parties, elections and communication fields. Although it has been given a variety of labels, including 'Americanized' (Negrine and Papathanassopoulos, 1996), 'postmodern' (Norris, 2000; Plasser and Plasser, 2002), 'phase 3' (Farrell and Webb, 2000), 'post-Fordist' (Denver and Hands, 2000) and 'high-tech' (Strachan, 2003), there is basic agreement among scholars over the essential ingredients of the new approach, which can be summarized as the increasing 'professionalization' of the tools and strategies parties and candidates use to appeal to voters (Farrell, 1996; Gibson and Römmele, 2001; Lilleker and Negrine, 2002).

Figures and Tables:

Table 1. Professionalized campaigning index scores by party

Figure 1. Systemic environment.

Table 2. Priming and intervening variables

Appendix: Campaign Professionalization Index. Full Scoring Scheme

Next to Last Paragraph:
To conclude, therefore, this analysis has shown the CAMPROF Index to be successful in producing a range of scores that allow for inter-party ranking and comparison in terms of the extent of professionalized campaigning that is being undertaken. Furthermore, the analysis has shown those scores to be meaningful (at least in the context of the German 2005 election) in that they correspond to a series of theoretical expectations (derived from the wider literature) about which parties are more or less likely to adopt the techniques. The SPD, as anticipated, emerged as the most professionalized party, with the Greens the least, the CDU and FDP running a close second and third, respectively.