Abstract
Ground Wars is a book about ‘field’, that part of US political campaigns responsible for getting out the vote. It describes a world where the staff are stressed, the volunteers high maintenance, the offices temporary and the candidates so remote they are unrecognisable when occasionally appearing at their own events.
The primary contribution of Rasmus Kleis Nielsen's ethnography is to identify the combination of paid staff, part-time workers, volunteers, allied interest groups and civic associations as a ‘campaign assemblage’ which is ‘unevenly professionalized, heterogeneous, and temporary’, neither the romantic image of grassroots democracy nor the ruthlessly professional organisation that dominates popular coverage (p. 33). This book will be of interest to those studying political campaigns and elections and is appropriate for the informed public, students and scholars.
Chapter 2 starts with a brief history of US political campaigns and the choices of Democratic and Republican Party elites regarding whether to invest in field campaigns. Chapter 3 follows Nielsen, part-timers and volunteers in going door to door and making phone calls. Here it becomes clear how personalised political communications are not nearly as scripted as elites (and many political communications scholars) would have you believe. Chapter 4 addresses the constituent elements of the ‘campaign assemblage’, describing how volunteers, part-time workers, allied organisations and campaign staff all operate under different organisational logics of hierarchy, markets and networks. Chapter 5 covers the development of technological innovations that make voter targeting possible.
Usefully, Nielsen includes his research design as an appendix. Most readers should read this early on, because the research design does much to explain both the central innovation and the shortcomings of the book. By splitting time between two different Democratic campaigns for House seats – one each in Connecticut and New Jersey – Nielsen can write in generalisable terms about how campaigns are organised. But with the exception of the experimental research on campaign efficacy, the wealth of data and descriptive episodes are not thoroughly developed or connected to any ongoing theoretical or empirical debates in political science. Concepts like institutionalised racism, organisation, participation or policy influence are dropped in but do not contribute or relate to the vast scholarship on institutions, race and ethnicity, organisational studies, science and technology studies, political participation or representation. The book succeeds in providing an account of what campaigns are really like, but most theoretical contributions are not fully formed.