The rally-intensive campaign: A distinct form of electioneering in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond Pre-proof of article for publication in the International Journal of Press/Politics in May 2019 Dr. Dan Paget Department of Political Science University College London danpaget.com
[email protected] The literature on political communication is a redoubt of modernist thought. Histories of political communication are in part histories of technological progress. Accounts, which are too numerous to list comprehensively here, rehearse a well-worn story in which newspapers are joined by radio, limited-channel television, multiple-channel television, the Internet and social media in turn (Dinkin 1989; Epstein 2018). Numerous authors have organized these successive innovations into ‘ages’ or ‘orders’ of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Epstein 2018). These modernist ideas bleed into the study of election campaigns. A series of accounts using parallel categories construct three ideal-types of election campaign (Norris 2000). These campaign types capture, among other things, changes in the methods by which messages are conveyed. ‘Old’ face-to-face methods of communication in ‘premodern’ campaigns are supplemented and sometimes replaced by a succession of ‘new’ methods in ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ campaigns. These theories embrace a form of developmental linearity. They conceive of a single path of campaign ‘evolution’ (Norris 2000). While campaigns may progress or regress, campaign change Dan Paget Pre-proof version is collapsed onto a single dimension, whether by the name of modernization or professionalization. It is this linearity that gives typologies of election campaigns their modernist character. It is also essential to these theories’ parochialism.