They and others argue that methods for choosing leaders in modern polities have given rise to a realignment of political actors. Mancini and Swanson find that political parties are less important in the political process, and mass media executives, political consultants, and other election management specialists are now the key players in developing the political candidate. What has emerged is “a ‘marketing’ approach to campaigning”, they say, “relying on experts in public relations, opinion polling, and communications for advice about how to craft an appealing message tailored to the voters’ opinions and concerns”. This gives rise to an emphasis “on the personalities of party leaders, for appealing personalities are currency of high denomination in media logic” (Swanson and Mancini, 1996, p. 251). Financial and business interests do not feature as consequential in their writing.

Professionalization is premised on an apolitical assumption that the ‘modernization’ of politics requires management of its processes, including elections, by professionals, which represents an advancement over a reliance on citizen participatants (‘amateurs’). Challengers to political incumbents are advised that they will succeed only when they recognize “the positive influence of professionalization” and learn how to “move from amateur to highly professionalized campaigns”. Professionalization is concerned more about ‘winning’ elections and less about the quality of citizenship (Medvic, 2000, pp. 102-103). Issues of sovereignty, political inclusiveness, and social justice get lost In this literature, which is more about promotionalism and the stock-in-trade of the professionals — the speeches, polling, media advertising, telemarketing, etc. — without ever questioning the problem of  corporate financing and agenda setting.

It’s no wonder that even mainstream ‘liberal’ presidential candidates like Carter, Clinton, and Kerry fail to challenge corporate domination of politics, and why the Nader campaign, even while marginalized and eschewing professionalization, is such a compelling form of protest. Nader’s lack of high-priced professionalization in one reason the mass media fail to give his campaign serious consideration. Professionalization excludes challenges from critics of the system, especially from the left. Scammell (1998), on the other hand, uncritically conceives professionalization to be the “hallmark of modern campaigning” (p. 269).

The central question that the professionalization thesis ignores is, Where does power actually reside, and how is it wielded in the electoral process? Elections are decidedly not about how campaign specialists orchestrate events, even if Jimmy Carter’s celebrated pollster Patrick Caddell boasted, “We are the pre-selectors. We determine who shall run for office” (Clark, 1996, p. 869). The professionalization argument fails to consider the legal and material regime of wealth creation that operates in the United States and elsewhere; the political options that elite interests are able to and must exercise to defend and perpetuate their privileged and hegemonic agenda in society. Is it even conceivable that organized corporate interests, such as the pharmaceutical, airline, electronics, automobile, energy industries, could ignore or play a passive role in the electoral process? Yet the technocentric arguments that the professionalization ‘school’ puts forward about the established and authoritative technique of politics do not lend themselves, precisely because of their technical rationale, to open public engagement and debate, nor are they treated by their proponents as being in any serious way controvesial. Such an approach normalizes citizen indifference or spectator relationship to politics.

This approach rests on the axiomatic principle within elite circles that ordinary people can not be entrusted to set the social and political agenda. That responsibility properly belongs to the educated and professionally prepared political strata. Edward Bernays (1947), the early master of public relations, had called the elite system of social control "the engineering of consent." And Walter Lippmann referred to the same idea as the “manufacture of consent” (Herman and Chomsky, 2002, p. 332, n. 5). Earnest Elmo Calkins argued in his widely read Business the Civilizer (1928) that advertising helps ‘civilize’ people to wants they didn’t know they had (Mayhew, 1997, p. 191). Although nominally independent, the administrative classes ultimately derive their authority from what C. Wright Mills identified as the ‘power elite’ and their ruling institutions. Mills allowed that the “power elite are not solitary rulers” but rely on “[a]dvisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers [who] are often the captains of their higher thought and decision” (Mills, 1956, p. 4). Referencing only that small fraction of political organization, the professionalization thesis leaves a false understanding concerning the locus of political power.

Professionalization assigns little value to analyzing the larger political economic context in which politics is situated or the factors that historically joined modern technological development as we know it, its underlying processes, and administrative policies to corporate interests and necessities. (See Sussman, 1997, especially chapters 3 and 4, for a discussion of the embedded politics in technology.) Ignoring this historical power context, professionalization assumes intrinsically natural, inevitable, logical, and progressive characteristics in the submission of elections to ‘expert’-mediated management. Formal politics is not simply about planning and administration by technique, technicians, and technology; such an argument masks what elections, in fact, have become: more industrialized, commercialized, and merchandised. The ‘pay-to-play’ precondition for candidacy and office prefigures political control by highly financed organized interests. This makes natural allies of the consultants, the public opinion specialists, the media advisors, the mass media, the transnational corporate sector, and other friendly governments, ideologues, and politicos in pursuit of common neoliberal objectives — in short, the political-industrial complex (PIC).  Within the ranks of the PIC, this system of selecting leaders is seen as a normal aspect of a highly stratified democracy, but one in which a narrow stratum is presumed to be fit to rule.

Mancini sees the key political fallout from professionalization as the demise of the political party. He doesn’t consider, however, how parties have been internally restructured to the needs of the new political economy. In the professionalization argument, there is no animate force, only a passive narrative, in the changes Mancini describes in ‘the becoming’ and ‘the undergoing’ — leaving a deep sense of mystery about what is actually driving  ‘professionalization’. He writes,

The ‘digital citizen’ prefigures the possibility of direct interactions among citizens, leaders, and officials, which, bypassing the mediation of the political parties in favor of technical skills already developed in the fields of research and business, further undermine the parties’ role and importance. In short, the process of professionalization has accelerated, producing effects not only in party structures but also, as shown later, in the very functioning of democracy. Not only the party is becoming more professionalized, but also the whole field of politics is undergoing the same process (Mancini, 1999, p. 236; italics added).

In modern elections, unelected political consultants indeed have superseded to a great extent the function of political parties, and party issues and ideological coherence have been replaced by a new form of propaganda — candidate image construction. Particularly in the United States, where the primary system is used to build name recognition and voter familiarity, political consultants are a crucial resource to the candidates in capturing the attention of a largely disinterested electorate (Blumler, Kavanagh, and Nossiter, 1996, p. 57). It is a much easier campaign for those candidates, such as Jesse Ventura, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a son of a president, already with name recognition. Former senator and presidential candidate Robert Dole complained that the new political faces are often those of celebrities, not those of people, like himself, who have worked their way through the political party system (Witcover, 1999, p. 34).

At the end of the 19th century, participation among eligible voters was above 80% in presidential elections, almost 90% outside the south, and close to 70% in midterm congressional elections. Since the 1960s, presidential election turnouts have been declining, reaching 49.1% in 1996. Even a tightly contested race in 2000 interested only 51.1% of the electorate. Midterm congressional polls typically have brought out just over a third of the electorate (Ginsberg and Shefter, 1999, pp. 18, 20). Had the United States adopted a law like the one used in Serbia or Georgia, that turnouts of less than 50% invalidate the election, the 1996 contest would not have counted, and well over 90% of (non-presidential year) congressional, state, and local electoral outcomes would have to be thrown out.

Despite the fact that the majority repeatedly choose not to vote in local, state, and national elections, the elite strata, including the mass media, still hold up the ritual as the crucial test of a government’s legitimacy. In the 1988 election, the turnout was 50.1%, and half of those who voted, according to an ABC News exit poll, did so primarily to block either the Democratic or Republican candidate (Denton and Woodward, 1990, p. 99). Congress apparently does not regard low turnouts and voter disinterest as a serious problem, else it would act to raise the level of participation, such as by changing the voting day, or determining and acting on the social causes of public disaffection. Is voting a meaningful exercise in representative democracy or merely a defense of the status quo, engaging the public in a spectacular but largely meaningless citizen activity in which the “process is pitched almost entirely toward winning. . . not toward governing afterward” (Bennett, 1996, p. 161).

Performing key informational, commercial, ideological, and legitimating functions in industrialized society, media corporations are central to the PIC and very much at home with the professionalization trope and the practical business of organizing political contests. At the heart of the trope is an ideological premise that disembodied technique, rather than organized power, is the agency of political change. Professionalization thus assures that a predictable revenue stream will flow to ‘the messenger’. Each election season confers a multi-billon dollar windfall upon the mass media (especially television), which draws half or more of all campaign expenditures.           Races for House and Senate seats in 1996 cost $840 million, and spending in all federal, state, and local elections that year was $2.7 billion. The average Senate campaign took $4.5 million ($4.7 million for the winners), which means that each senator had to generate $14,000 in contributions per week over the six year term. House members, the winners spending an average of $673,000, had to raise an average of over $5,000 per week (Economist, 1997; Johnson, 2001, p. 170; Schlesinger, ca. 1997), but also have to run for office three times as frequently as their Senate counterparts. Fund raising and spending in all federal electons in 2004 was expected to far surpass the previous election cycle.

The media maximize income from the electoral process by spinning its ‘dramatic’ elements: personal conflict, superficial controversies, and a tight horserace. Television and newspaper companies are fond of reporting, conducting themselves, or commissioning, sometimes jointly, polls on political trends. Polling appears to put them in touch with the public mood. Often, the poll itself is the news, which news organizations and their favored media pundits can then use to help frame a political discourse — one that is contained within elite agenda-setting possibilities (Lewis, 2002, p. 79). Nothing requires the media or politicians to take up issues that do not interest them, regardless of how widespread certain critical opinions may be. Polling is particularly fruitful for the media when it helps them report on which candidate or party happens to be ahead at the time (or on which issue, as they frame the issues, happens to be favored in the public initiative process) — again, the horserace.

Indeed, the tighter the "contest," the higher the level of candidate, party, or interest group expenditures, which means more revenue for the media in the form of political advertising. Of the campaign stories covered by the nightly network news in the 2000 presidential campaign, 71% were about the horserace, not about the issues (Taylor, 2002, p. 11). Reporting on political tactics trumps candidates’ policy orientations. In the process, substantive controversies such as growing income disparities, high rates of poverty and underemployment, inadequate educational, housing, and health care investment, capital flight, the class composition of combat forces, and a host of other issues pertinent to working and middle class voters — and what should be treated as the scandal of extremely low voter turnouts (see Table 1. for comparative data)  ^— get lost in mass media coverage and in how the political advertisers package the ‘issues’. When U.S. consultants take their electioneering package abroad, they help reshape the local style of campaigns, introduce fundraising into politics, and alter the meaning of leadership. In Austalia’s experience, American consultants helped trivialize issues and turned campaigning and fund raising into capital rather than labor intensive activities. The result places further distance between the political parties and the voters, making the parties seem less relevant as institutions  for mass political representation (Elaine Thompson, cited in Plasser, 2000, p. 44). This pattern of increasing dealignment of voters from parties has occurred in almost all of the leading industrial states during the past 30 years or so (Plasser & Plasser, 2002, pp. 304-306), as elections have become more industrialized and professionalized, as parties have adopted a more centrist and pro-business ideology, and as politicians seem to be more remote from ordinary people and the public interest.

Under neoliberal restructuring, the separation of the public and private sector has broken down, and politics is more directly administered by corporate interests. Corporations have become much larger economic and more spatially dispersed entities (the largest of which have more assets than most nation states), and their financial contributions to political parties and candidates in the U.S. and elsewhere have rapidly accelerated. In the U.S., political consultants, politicians, cabinet members, federal regulators, and other government officials glide seamlessly between public service and private enterprise. The centrist politics of Clinton and Blair, more than the reactionary Reagan and Thatcher governments, represented the triumph of the corporate market and the capitulation of the social welfare state.

The neoliberal era also represents the triumph of the technology-intensive, business-like system of producing and selling candidates to corporate patrons and the voting public. Jürgen Habermas in 1974 called this direction the ‘scientificization’ of politics, referring to the broader use of instrumental means to control the process of information, voter behavior, and election outcomes — and the rationalization of the political and public sphere (Mancini and Swanson, 1996). For the publisher and editor of the consulting industry’s leading trade journal, Campaigns & Elections, Ron Faucheux, who himself consults for both Republicans and Democrats, the conduct of campaigns is technologically determined. In his view, “Technology - and not candidates, consultants, or the press - is driving change” (Faucheux, 1996, p. 5). To assign change to technology is to relieve the latter three of political agency and accountability.

A contributor to that journal, American Association of Political Consultants president, Ray Strother, wh