The value of political consulting : a segmentation of services and evaluation tools

Political consulting has been exposed to critical debates about its necessity and usefulness over the past ten years. The question of "how much value has been added?" has not yet been addressed in this field, while in management consulting evaluation of projects has a long tradition. On the one hand, this could be due to the fragmented market for political consulting, with heterogeneous projects, not allowing for methods, and results of these projects being compared to each other. On the other hand, there has not yet been an attempt to segment the market according to which evaluation tools can be applied. This paper will develop a segmentation of the market for political consulting and will shed some first light on the transferability of evaluation tools from management consulting to the segments. It is to be understood as a starting point in the research on evaluating political consulting assignments to open up the field for further empirical investigations.