Intensive use of tools and resources for political professionalization in presidential campaigns: the case of Colombia 2018

Abstract

The presidential campaigns in Colombia are increasingly sophisticated and professionalized. Candidates and parties hire experts, make intensive use of new technologies and the media, personalize the campaign, and conduct opinion polls or surveys regarding citizens’ perception. Considering the professionalization advances, the objectives of this work are, first, to measure the level of the campaign's professionalization of the three main presidential candidates of Colombia in 2018 (Iván Duque, Gustavo Petro, and Sergio Fajardo), and, second, to identify the areas of greater development of techniques and innovation made by the different groups of these campaigns. To measure the level of professionalization, we built an index that allows comparisons inside and outside the campaigns. The cases analyzed show that the advantage in electoral preferences is not enough to obtain victory, but rather that campaigns with a certain level of professionalization are required. Likewise, we can see that in the 2018 Colombian presidential campaign the level of professionalization is explained by the communicative dimension, depending on the media structures, the image projection and the emotionality of the staging of the communicative tool.