caa a22 4500 388028106 CHVBK 20180307124942.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199806 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/420243 doi S1049096500054184 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/420243 Political Consultants and the Extension of Party Goals [Elektronische Daten] Political consultants are seen as influential actors in American politics who may effect policy long after their service on an election has concluded. Many observers of the consulting industry (see, for example, Shea 1996; Sabato 1981) have suggested that the use of political consultants has been especially bad for political parties, contributing to their decline. Proponents of the party decline thesis maintain that consultants weaken parties by giving candidates independent support bases for conducting their campaigns, creating a campaign climate where individual candidates take the voting public's focus away from party platforms. But consultants have become prominent because the parties cannot always offer up-to-date technical services and close attention to local situations. Some political scientists suggest that political consultants can assist parties in attaining their goals by providing the highly professional and technical services to party candidates that party organizations themselves cannot (Luntz 1988). Further, political consultants tend to work in concert with political parties because they depend on the parties for a supply of clients (Sabato 1981; Luntz 1988). Here we explore another dimension of the consultant-political party relationship: the role political parties play in training political consultants. We hypothesize that contemporary political consultants are likely to have had close links (such as prior employment) with a political party since the 1970s, when parties began adopting new technologies and training their employees to use them. Consultant background vis-a-vis political parties can lead to two very different notions of the effect of consultant activity on our politics. Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1998 Kolodny Robin Temple University Logan Angela Temple University PS: Political Science & Politics Cambridge University Press 31/2(1998-06), 155-159 1049-0965 31:2<155 1998 31 PSC https://doi.org/10.2307/420243 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/420243 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Kolodny Robin Temple University NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Logan Angela Temple University NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- PS: Political Science & Politics Cambridge University Press 31/2(1998-06), 155-159 1049-0965 31:2<155 1998 31 PSC CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge