In search of the Americanization: Candidates and political campaigns in European General Election

In 2012, Obama's election marked the appearance of "Fast Politics": resulting, on one hand, in 24 hour news, a large amount of auto-generated contents produced by voters through digital media, fragmentation, the instantaneous transmission of messages and, on the other, a reduction of the collective attention threshold. Social networks have become mainstream media, so that the digital strategist and the big data analyst have achieved a special place in the "war room", next to the campaign director and the pollster. Once again, as in the past, the evolution of media ends up changing the nature of election campaigns and political consulting requirements, and the “American model” has become the benchmark of political communication evolution. What is happening in Europe? Is there a unique model of evolution for political communication? The general aim of this study is to explore the change of electoral campaigns, by carrying out an analysis of the activities of European candidates during the most recent general elections. The aim is to verify if the “American model” has been imported in Europe with special focus on the techniques and the style of election campaign management. In particular, adopting a comparative approach among the European states, the study analysed the usage of political consulting, the personalization of political communication and the degree of “digitalization”. The comparative analysis among European states used the data provided by the Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS 2013) and constructed synthetic indexes on professionalization and digitization campaigns, conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis.