Candidate and general elections: the role of electoral campaign

The digital platform deeply changed the electoral campaigns, producing a consequent evolution of political consulting. Social networks have become the mainstream media so that the digital strategist and the big data analysts have achieved a special place in the ""war room"", next to the campaign director and the pollster. Obama's election (2012) marks the entrance in the ""Fast Politics"": 24 hours news, a large amount of auto-generated contents produced by the voters through digital media, fragmentation, instantaneous transmission of messages but, at the same time, reduction of the attention threshold. Once again, as in the recent past, the evolution of the media (2.0) ends up changing the nature of election campaigns and political consulting request. What happens in Europe? Study's objective is to carry out a comparative analysis on the professionalization of candidates and MPs electoral staff, in order to verify how the American model, the techniques and the style of election campaigns management have been imported in the European context. In particular, the focus is on new media: an ancillary use or, on the contrary, a new tool for consensus? Within a comparative approach between the European states, the study explores the use of political consulting during last general elections and in the current legislature, with a focus on Italian MPs. For the comparative analysis between European states, the study used secondary data (CCS 2013. Comparative Candidates Survey) and construct synthetic indexes on the professionalization and digitization campaigns to conduct a subsequent quantitative and qualitative analysis; in order to study Italian parliamentarians, a survey was conducted through a semi-structured questionnaire.