Mexican presidential campaigns of 2018: Level of professionalization, war room, and political strategies

Abstract

In the last two decades, presidential campaigns in Mexico have shown greater professionalism. Parties and candidates conduct surveys, plan discursive strategies, make intensive use of new technologies, personalize the campaign in the candidate, and hire specialists in political marketing, image, media, social networks, and audiovisual production. Considering these advanc-es, it is worth to ask: what’s the professionalization level of political campaigns? In the present work we propose 1) to measure the level of professionalization of the 2018 Mexican presidential campaigns and 2) identify the areas of greatest development and innovation and the differences presented by the teams of the three most voted candidates. To measure the level of professionaliza-tion, we built an index that allows comparisons within a party system and cross-national.