Professionalisation of election campaigning in South Korea

In recent years, many scholars in the field of political communication have discussed professionalisation of election campaigning in dealing with the development of mass media and technology as well as the increased demand for external campaign professionals in the political process. It is true that parties have struggled to manage these on-going alterations efficiently as well as scientifically to attract more voter attention within their limited budget. Naturally, political parties need to seek external campaign professionals’ helps to make a more professionalised election campaign. Accordingly, this research utilises two different dimensions – external and internal- to figure out the notion of professionalisation in election campaigning. Firstly, this research aims to demonstrate how and by how much political parties’ presidential election campaigns in South Korea have become more technically sophisticated in mass media mobilisation and the adaptation of new technologies. Secondly, this research will look at how the relationship between external campaign professionals and political parties has been changed and how political parties have made their organisation more ‘systemic’ and ‘tactical’ using communication technologies. To answer these research purposes, this research will choose three presidential elections (1997, 2002 and 2007) and two major parties –the Grand National Party and the Democratic Party - in South Korea. This will enable the researcher to look at historical alterations and compare election campaign strategies between each of the parties to figure out whether they seek different campaign strategies, and, if so, why they choose differently. Therefore, this research will analyse the data of 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with campaign managers who either were or are inside one of the party organisations and of external campaign professionals who are outside the party organisations in three different periods to answer the research questions. As a result of the above, this research found that professionalisation of Korean election campaigns is underway because both parties have tried to adopt new campaign practices and manage their organisation in a more efficient way. However, due to strict campaign regulations in South Korea, this finally led to the situation that parties cannot invest money into designing competitive campaign strategies through the liberal use of mass media and campaign technology. In addition to this, it is confirmed that both parties have increased the number of external campaign professionals in order to deal with new campaign practices and the relationship between parties and external campaign professionals has become a business relationship.