Although political consultants have increasingly been the subject of scholarly research, there is little agreement as to what a ‘political consultant’ actually is. Early research in the field, and a good deal of contemporary work as well, has provided only vague conceptualisations of the term. Recent quantitative work that attempts to examine the role and impact of consultants in elections suffers from a lack of a common operational definition. After a brief review of the way systematic empirical researchers operationalise ‘professional political consultant,’ I offer a comprehensive definition that can be used in future research on the topic. Without an agreed definition to employ, the study of political consulting will remain idiosyncratic and fragmentary. That, in turn, hampers efforts to provide normative evaluation, and comparative analysis, of the consulting phenomenon.
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