Although it is not certain that political consultants directly or covertly have acted as operatives of the government in the same way as American journalists did from the 1940s to 1970s, it can be assumed that some receive at least official encouragement to help seat and unseat pro- and anti-U.S. politicians. Invited to El Salvador, Philip Noble, an American political consultant who worked for Bill Clinton, signed up as a strategist to make Francisco Flores president. Noble spoke no Spanish and knew little about the country, but for Noble such limitations are inconsequential. He argued that technology has changed the election process and that “the basic social and policy issues that we’re dealing with are largely the same around the world” (quoted in Harwood, 1999, pp. A1, A18). Apparently, ideological consistency was of little importance to Noble, inasmuch as Flores ran under the right-wing Arena Party, which a decade earlier was connected to massive death squad violence under a U.S.-supported regime that had little taste for open electoral contests. Flores won and took office in 1999.

When Noble went to work for Flores and Arena in 1998, it was Argentinian political consultant, pollster, Latin American secretary for the International Association of Political Consultants, and founding president of the Latin American Association of Political Consultants Felipe Noguera who hired him. Noguera is described as “an Oxford-educated computer whiz who once worked for Andersen Consulting” (a division of Arthur Andersen, renamed Accenture in 2001), who has been a consultant to right-wing candidates throughout Central and South America. Flores studied at Amherst College, and his running mate, Carlos Quintanilla, went to the American University in Washington, D.C. Noguera’s goal is to “develop an alternative to the left-leaning neo-populism that is spreading in Latin America” (“Movers & Shakers: Felipe Noguera,” 2004, p. 17). On the other side of El Salavador’s political spectrum, the left-wing FMLN candidate, Facundo Guardado, hired its own American consultant, Peter Schechter, as part of its own image modification campaign. Borrowing a page out of the Dukakis campaign, the Guardado message in one TV ad was that it was not about left or right politics, but rather that “It’s about solutions” (Harwood, 1999, p. A18). Guardado’s new image strategy turned out to be as successful as Dukakis’s.

In Fall 2001, American consultants gathered in Australia in anticipation of a called election to be contested mainly between the conservative Liberal Party, led by John Howard, and the Labor Party, led by Kim Beazley. In the previous election, Beazley accused Howard of attempting to ‘Americanise’ Australia’s political system (Thompson, 1998, p. 119). “Whether it=s direct mail or savvy, quick-hit political sound bites on television and radio, many Australian campaigns - already known for a rough-and-tumble style - are increasingly taking on an American flavour” (Mark, 2001, p. 8) and unmistakenly are influenced by past and present American TV political ads and messages (Beresford, 1998). Despite these influences, Australians remain sensitive about foreign involvement in their political affairs, and even though American consultants have been working in the country since the late 1960s, they often have had to maintain a low profile. Since the first intensive contacts with American consultants in Australian elections in the late 1960s, Australian campaign professionals have been regularly visiting the United States for training in the latest election management skills and techniques. These have included training in polling and political marketing, “American-style techniques of trivialisation”, and what one writer described as “the deliberate creation of ‘pseudo events’ . . . to attract television attention”, and the use of “Richard Nixon-style ‘Dirty Tricks’” (Thompson, 1998, pp. 116-118). Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) permanently altered the ethical grounds of electioneering.

The same writer expressed concern that the importation of U.S. ways of employing television advertising, polling, and image making have seriously altered Australian election campaigns and politics, even if some of the language and style of campaigning remains Australian in character. Under such influence, Australian elections have tended to more intensely accentuate the importance of fund raising in politics and political leadership. They also have increasingly reduced campaigning to image making rather than issues, and transformed electoral contests “into capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive activities” — putting “further distance between the political parties and the voters, [thus] making the parties seem less relevant as vehicles for mass political representation” (Thompson, 1998, p. 120). Others in Australia are disturbed by the rise of commercial styles, marketing, and voter surveillance, stratification and targeting, along with an ‘arms race’ in the employment of new campaign techniques and technologies in that country’s elections, trends that are attributed largely to U.S. influence (Beresford, 1998).

American-style electioneering has definitely grabbed hold in Australia (Plasser & Plasser, 2002, p. 28), replacing what’s left of an already diminished influence of the British ‘Westminster model’. Australia now extensively uses direct mail and polling, which, in the view of one local consultant, have made elections “very sterile” affairs (Mark, 2001, p. 8). Political parties, meanwhile, have acquired a particularly strong penchant for American-style hard-hitting, so-called ‘negative’, television political ads, for which there are no legal limits on political parties, and which represents a shift in and corrosive effect on political practices in Australian campaigning (Beresford, 1998, pp. 26, 30). Unlike the United States, however, Australian elections are not funded heavily by soft money or individual donations, and air time is provided free to political parties - although paid political advertising, since 1992, has existed as well. With compulsory voting in place, parties do not need to strategize around probable voters as in the United States.