ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the contributions of election campaign research to communication studies and especially to the development of political communications as an increasingly specialist and self-confident field within it. Assessments of how the political communications held has been influenced by the long-standing prominence of election research are surprisingly rare in the literature. A connection between the held of communication research and political science was forged rather fortuitously by the example and influence of Lazarsfeld et al. in their research on the US presidential election. From the perspective of communication research, the apparent paucity of significant findings about the influence of mass media in election campaigns is not too difficult to account for, quite apart from the power of methods available, especially with the benefit of hindsight. Election campaigns are highly amenable to cross-national political communication comparisons. Such comparisons are indispensable if the often alleged trends of Americanization and globalization of political communication arrangements are to be properly traced and clarified.
