A specific look at political public relations, helping students understand how theories of public relations tie into political campaigns and what constituents see in the media. Tying into current political events, it is incredibly timely given current political atmosphere. New chapters on lobbying, activism and underrepresented groups bring the material fully up to date and relevant for today's students.

Have you ever seen a politician fiercely attacking his opponent? Sure you have. Election campaigns without attacks on the rival candidate's performance, policy propositions and traits simply do not exist. Negative campaigning makes up a substantial part of election campaigns around the world. Though heavily covered in election news, the practice is strongly disliked by political pundits, journalists and voters. Some are even concerned that negative campaigning damages democracy itself. Negative campaigning has inspired numerous scholars in recent decades. But much of the existing research examines the phenomenon only in the United States, and scholars disagree on how the practice should be defined and measured, which has resulted in open-ended conclusions about its causes and effects. This unique volume presents for the first time work examining negative campaigning in the US, Europe and beyond. It presents systematic literature overviews and new work that touches upon three fundamental questions: What is negative campaigning and can we measure it? What causes negative campaigning? And what are its effects?

The emergence of green parties throughout Europe during the 1980s marked the arrival of a new form of political movement, challenging established models of party politics and putting new issues on the political agenda. Since their emergence, green parties in Europe have faced different destinies; in countries such as Germany, Belgium, Finland, France, and Italy, they have accumulated electoral successes, participated in governments, implemented policies and established themselves as part of the party system. In other countries, their political relevance remains very limited. After more than 30 years on the political scene, green parties have proven to be more than just a temporary phenomenon. They have lost their newness, faced success and failure, power and opposition, grassroots enthusiasm and internal conflicts. Green Parties in Europe includes individual case studies and a comparative perspective to bring together international specialists engaged in the study of green parties. It renews and expands our knowledge about the green party family in Europe.

In recent years, the city many hoped would help democratize China has instead become a research setting in which to study China's increasing intolerance of dissent. Since Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, China's treatment of Hong Kong could be divided into three stages: non-intervention, intervention, and securitization. If the July 1 march in 2003 is a watershed that marked Beijing's change from non-intervention to intervention, this book suggests that the Umbrella Movement in 2014 is another watershed that marked Beijing's change from intervention to securitization. This book is a theoretically driven case study of the Umbrella Movement, a massive sit-in that paralyzed key business and retail districts for 79 days in Hong Kong in 2014. Many Hongkongers believe that they have the right to a fair election of the chief executive, and Beijing's insistence on vetting candidates prompted the outbreak of the Umbrella Movement. Drawing insights from the securitization theory and fear appeal literature, the book proposes the framework of "security appeal." It argues that the outbreak of the Umbrella Movement resulted from a premature use of hard repression, that is, before the government convinced the general public that the Umbrella Movement was a threat. The eventual successful securitization entails a general acceptance of the threatening nature of the Umbrella Movement and agreement with its crackdown. This book concludes that one of the consequences of the securitization of the Umbrella Movement is Beijing's eventual switch to the policy of "patriotocracy" - a system that allocates power and resources based on one's professed patriotism - in lieu of One Country, Two Systems. The policy implications and theoretical and methodological contributions of this book will be of interest to scholars and students of security studies; Chinese politics; and various social science disciplines, including political science, psychology, criminology, and sociology.

This book furthers our understanding of the practice of propaganda with a specific focus on the RussiaGate case. RussiaGate is a discourse about alleged Russian "meddling" in US elections, and this book argues that it functions as disinformation or distraction. The book provides a framework for better understanding of ongoing developments of RussiaGate, linking these to macroconsiderations that rarely enter mainstream accounts. It demonstrates the considerable weaknesses of many of the charges that have been made against Russia by US investigators, and argues that this discourse fails to take account of broader non-transparent persuasion campaigns operating in the election-information environment that are strengthened by social media manipulation. RussiaGate has obscured many of the factors that challenge the integrity of democratic process in the USA. These deserve a much higher priority than any influence that Russia may want to exert. The book concludes that RussiaGate discourse needs to be contextualized with reference to a long-established broader competition between great powers for domination of EurAsia. This pitches the US/European Union against Russia/China and perhaps, ultimately, even the USA against Europe. This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, propaganda studies, US politics, Russian politics, and International Relations in general.

How did the EU, US, and Canada decide and implement their electoral assistance in the Palestinian Territories (PT)? Why did the EU, the US, and Canada embark on assisting the elections in the PT, and what factors influenced their electoral assistance? What lessons can be learned for other countries approaching elections after a long period of conflict? This book answers these questions and charts the process of electoral assistance with an in-depth analysis of each transatlantic actor's electoral assistance in the PT. It shows that, despite the many institutional and operational differences between the EU, the US, and Canada, the three actors do share common interests and influencing factors which often unify their response. The book also reveals the limitations facing electoral assistance and the implications of this on the sustainability, clarity, consistency, and responsiveness of the policy. In this systematic, comparative analysis of European, American and Canadian efforts to assist elections and transform governance in conflict zones Rouba Al-Fattal greatly advances the empirical knowledge of electoral assistance and provides the first steps needed to reform electoral assistance policy to cope with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

First published in French in 1939, and later in English in 1940, this work by the author, analyses and strongly critiques the effect of Nazi propaganda on the psychology of the masses. By bringing together the political and the psychological, the author refers to the use of propaganda in order to serve the ends of a handful of men as 'psychical rape' and warns that this phenomenon cannot be attributed solely to the Nazi regime. The English translation was updated to account for the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. It will be of great interest to anyone studying the Second World War, Nazism, Fascism and the psychology of propaganda.

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies for their political ideas to be heard: they either accommodate or resist the Israeli institutional suppression of Arabic. They also codeswitch and borrow from Hebrew as well as from Arabic registers and styles in order to mobilise discursive authority. On political and cultural stages, multilingual Palestinian politicians and artists challenge the existing political structures. In the late capitalist market, language skills are re-packaged as commodified resources. With new evidence from recent and historical discourse, this book is about how speakers of a marginalised, contained language engage with the political system in the idioms at their disposal. The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship is key reading for advanced students and scholars of multilingualism, language contact, ideology, and policy, within sociolinguistics, anthropology, politics, and Middle Eastern studies.

This book investigates the Internet as a site of political contestation in the Indian context. It widens the scope of the public sphere to social media, and explores its role in shaping the resistance and protest movements on the ground. The volume also explores the role of the Internet, a global technology, in framing debates on the idea of the nation state, especially India, as well as diplomacy and international relations. It also discusses the possibility of whether Internet can be used as a tool for social justice and change, particularly by the underprivileged, to go beyond caste, class, gender and other oppressive social structures. A tract for our times, this book will interest scholars and researchers of politics, media studies, popular culture, sociology, international relations as well as the general reader.

This book analyzes top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation and collective identities through commemorative practices relating to events from the Second World War and the 1990s "Homeland War" in Croatia. With attention to media representations of commemorative events and opinion poll data, it draws on interviews and participant observation at commemorative events to focus on the speeches of political elites, together with the speeches of opposition politicians and other social actors (such as the Catholic Church, anti-fascist organizations and war veterans' and victims' organizations) who challenge official narratives. Offering innovative approaches to researching and analyzing commemorative practices in post-conflict societies, this examination of a nation's transition from a Yugoslav republic to an independent state - and now the newest member of the European Union - constitutes a unique case study for scholars of cultural memory and identity politics interested in the production and representation of national identities in official narratives.

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies for their political ideas to be heard: they either accommodate or resist the Israeli institutional suppression of Arabic. They also codeswitch and borrow from Hebrew as well as from Arabic registers and styles in order to mobilise discursive authority. On political and cultural stages, multilingual Palestinian politicians and artists challenge the existing political structures. In the late capitalist market, language skills are re-packaged as commodified resources. With new evidence from recent and historical discourse, this book is about how speakers of a marginalised, contained language engage with the political system in the idioms at their disposal. The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship is key reading for advanced students and scholars of multilingualism, language contact, ideology, and policy, within sociolinguistics, anthropology, politics, and Middle Eastern studies.

The state of political discourse in the United States today has been a subject of concern for many Americans. Political incivility is not merely a problem for political elites; political conversations between American citizens have also become more difficult and tense. The 2016 presidential elections featured campaign rhetoric designed to inflame the general public. Yet the 2016 election was certainly not the only cause of incivility among citizens. There have been many instances in recent years where reasoned discourse in our universities and other public venues has been threatened. This book was undertaken as a response to these problems. It presents and develops a more robust discussion of what civility is, why it matters, what factors might contribute to it, and what its consequences are for democratic life. The authors included here pursue three major questions: Is the state of American political discourse today really that bad, compared to prior eras; what lessons about civility can we draw from the 2016 election; and how have changes in technology such as the development of online news and other means of mediated communication changed the nature of our discourse? This book seeks to develop a coherent, civil conversation between divergent contemporary perspectives in political science, communications, history, sociology, and philosophy. This multidisciplinary approach helps to reflect on challenges to civil discourse, define civility, and identify its consequences for democratic life in a digital age. In this accessible text, an all-star cast of contributors tills the earth in which future discussion on civility will be planted.

Queer European Cinema commences with an overview of LGBTQ representation throughout cinematic history, interwoven with socio-political reality in Europe and beyond, to consider trends including the boarding school film, the gay road movie, and queer horror such as the lesbian vampire tale, before analysing case studies from the 'low culture' of pornography to the 'high culture' of arthouse cinema. This collection of essays explores borders and boundaries of geography, temporality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and desire in a range of European films at a time when both LGBTQ politics and the concept of Europe are under intense scrutiny in representation and reality, to demonstrate how LGBTQ film can serve as a political tool to create visibility and acceptance as well as providing entertainment. Chapters include an analysis of both trans and femme identities in Academy Award-winning Boys Don't Cry alongside German film, Unveiled; the intersection of lesbian visibility and the notion of nation on the Croatian screen at its point of entry into the European Union and during the gay marriage referendum; music and its relation to camp in Italian transnational cinema; European lesbian feminist pornography; and an analysis of liminal spaces and citizenship in queer French-language road movies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in European Cinema.

Political marketing has become a global phenomenon as parties try to copy the market-oriented approach employed by Tony Blair to win power for New Labour in 1997. Increasingly voters choose parties like consumers choose products, and this study looks at how some political parties, such as Sinn Fein, have been able to capitalise on this to gain support. It raises fresh perspectives on the more established political marketing practices in the UK and US, such as how to incorporate political leadership within the market-oriented framework and the democratic implications when faced with the actually business of governing. This book also highlights how the market-oriented party approach has spread around the world, including Europe and the new democracies of Brazil and Peru. The chapters, in demonstrating this convergence in practices, also question whether this strategy is appropriate for political systems based on proportional representation and coalition governments such as those in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and devolved systems in Northern Ireland and Scotland. The collection also introduces the debate on whether such practices enhance or undermine democracy, raising important questions on the future of political marketing. This book should become an established essential text for students and academics of political science and marketing. -- .

Trust is an essential component of social life and yet political polarization and social tensions can easily lead to its erosion. The articles collected in this volume throw a new light on the fundamentals of trust and trustworthiness and thus help us understand better the conditions and the limits of trust. The book brings together some of the best recent thinking on trust from across a broad spectrum of approaches and concerns. The essays range from the more abstract discussions of the conditions and nature of trust, to its application to our social and political lives in general, alongside more subject specific approaches such as trust in the media. Trust is a thick concept with both epistemic and normative content and significance, and several chapters engage with the ethical features of trust in distinct ways and also show the central role of trust in our decision-making. There is also an engagement with the phenomenological approach of Husserl in conjunction with Margaret Gilbert's theory of political obligation. The final chapter, by Onora O'Neill, one of the pioneers of the discussions of trust and trustworthiness in recent philosophy, links the topic of trust to the central issue of the conditions of trustworthiness. Given the paramount significance of the exercise of trust in our daily lives, this book will be of interest to philosophers and non-philosophers alike. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

This book provides a solid, encompassing definition of Internet memes, exploring both the common features of memes around the globe and their particular regional traits. It identifies and explains the roles that these viral texts play in Internet communication: cultural, social and political implications; significance for self-representation and identity formation; promotion of alternative opinion or trending interpretation; and subversive and resistant power in relation to professional media, propaganda, and traditional and digital political campaigning. It also offers unique comparative case studies of Internet memes in Russia and the United States.

This comprehensive volume is a three-part study of whether the Chinese political system has maintained a significant degree of regime legitimacy in the context of rising domestic discontent, in particular the popular protests against socio-economic inequality and environment degradation. Part I presents the scholarly debate on the theoretical refinement and empirical measurement of regime legitimacy in contemporary China. Part II focuses on the challenges to regime legitimacy of the increasingly widespread popular protests and civil activism. Part III examines the regime's responses to these challenges, including coercive repression, adaptation, and economic performance. This book finds that, while repression can hardly stop popular protests - and often backfires - economic performance legitimacy is increasingly difficult to be maintained. The only way out is the adaptation to the changing domestic and international environment. The chapters in this collection were originally published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

A widespread perception exists among political commentators, campaign operatives and presidential candidates that vice presidential (VP) running mates can deliver their home state's electoral votes in a presidential election. In recent elections, presidential campaigns have even changed their strategy in response to the perceived VP home state advantage. But is the advantage real? And could it decide a presidential election? In the most comprehensive analysis to date, Devine and Kopko demonstrate that the VP home state advantage is actually highly conditional and rarely decisive in the Electoral College. However, it could change the outcome of a presidential election under narrow but plausible conditions. Sophisticated in its methodology and rich in historical as well as contemporary insight, The VP Advantage is essential and accessible reading for anyone interested in understanding how running mates influence presidential elections. -- .

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consenting adults. However, support for transgender individuals lags far behind; a significant majority of Americans do not support the right of transgender people to be free from discrimination in housing, employment, public spaces, health care, legal documents, and other areas. Much of this is due to deeply entrenched ideas about the definition of gender, perceptions that transgender people are not "real" or are suffering from mental illness, and fears that extending rights to transgender people will come at the expense of the rights of others. So how do you get people to rethink their prejudices? In this book, Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison examine what tactics are effective in changing public opinion regarding transgender people. The result is a new approach that they call Identity Reassurance Theory. The idea is that individuals need to feel confident in their own identity before they can embrace a stigmatized group like transgender people, and that support of members of an outgroup can be encouraged by affirming the self-esteem of those targeted for attitude change. Michelson and Harrison, through their experiments, show that the most effective messaging on transgender issues meets people where they are, acknowledges their discomfort without judgment or criticism, and helps them to think about transgender people and rights in a way that aligns with their view of themselves as moral human beings.

Proposing a novel approach to understanding the contemporary political landscape, Akram draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer on agency and argues the need for an in-depth engagement with concepts of agency to improve the reach and scope of political analysis. Is the way that people engage with politics changing? If so, how well-equipped are we to document and explain the extent and range of the ways in which people are engaging in politics today? This book tackles these questions through a blend of theoretical reflection and empirical research, shedding new light on the relationship between arena and process definitions of politics, and how the social relates to the political. Hitherto unexplored features of agency such as the unconscious and the internal political conversation are shown to be critical in exploring how people mobilise today and how they make sense of their political engagement. Two in-depth case studies of the internal political conversations that individuals hold as well as an analysis of the 2011 UK riots are presented. Making a case for the role of self-expression in politics, this book will be of use for graduates and scholars interested in British politics, political theory, social theory, political sociology, the theory and practice of political engagement and political behaviour.

The state of political discourse in the United States today has been a subject of concern for many Americans. Political incivility is not merely a problem for political elites; political conversations between American citizens have also become more difficult and tense. The 2016 presidential elections featured campaign rhetoric designed to inflame the general public. Yet the 2016 election was certainly not the only cause of incivility among citizens. There have been many instances in recent years where reasoned discourse in our universities and other public venues has been threatened. This book was undertaken as a response to these problems. It presents and develops a more robust discussion of what civility is, why it matters, what factors might contribute to it, and what its consequences are for democratic life. The authors included here pursue three major questions: Is the state of American political discourse today really that bad, compared to prior eras; what lessons about civility can we draw from the 2016 election; and how have changes in technology such as the development of online news and other means of mediated communication changed the nature of our discourse? This book seeks to develop a coherent, civil conversation between divergent contemporary perspectives in political science, communications, history, sociology, and philosophy. This multidisciplinary approach helps to reflect on challenges to civil discourse, define civility, and identify its consequences for democratic life in a digital age. In this accessible text, an all-star cast of contributors tills the earth in which future discussion on civility will be planted.

Online social media are changing the face of politics in the United States. Beginning with a strong theoretical foundation grounded in political, communications and psychology literature, Tweeting to Power examines the effect of online social media on how people come to learn, understand and engage in politics. Gainous and Wagner propose that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer the opportunity for a new information flow that is no longer being structured and limited by the popular media. Television and newspapers, which were traditionally the sole or primary gatekeeper, can no longer limit or govern what information is exchanged. By lowering the cost of both supplying the information and obtaining it, social networking applications have recreated how, when and where people are informed. To establish this premise, Gainous and Wagner analyze multiple datasets, quantitative and qualitative, exploring and measuring the use of social media by voters and citizens as well as the strategies and approaches adopted by politicians and elected officials. They illustrate how these new and growing online communities are new forums for the exchange of information that is governed by relationships formed and maintained outside traditional media. Using empirical measures, they prove both how candidates utilize Twitter to shape the information voters rely upon and how effective this effort was at garnering votes in the 2010 congressional elections. With both theory and data, Gainous and Wagner show how the social media revolution is creating a new paradigm for political communication and shifting the very foundation of the political process.

To celebrate Singapore's fiftieth anniversary for its independence from Malaysia in 2015, 35 students, academics and activists came together to discuss and write about pioneering Singaporean human rights activists and their under-reported stories in Singapore. The city-state is known for its remarkable economic success while having strict laws on individual freedom in the name of national security, public order and racial harmony. Singapore's tough stance on human rights, however, does not negate the long and persistent existence of a human rights society that is little known to the world until today. This volume, composed of nine distinctive chapters, records a history of human rights activists, their campaigns, main contentions with the government, survival strategies and other untold stories in Singapore's first 50 years of state-building.

Less than two years after winning the 2013 elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to dissolve his government, paving the way for general elections. While the initial impression was that the upcoming elections were "pointless" and "unnecessary", the campaign gradually turned into a passionate and dramatic political competition, which reflected - and reenergized - the ideological, social, ethnic and cultural divides of Israeli society. This book describes and analyses a great variety of political, sociological and cultural dimensions of the 2015 elections for the 20th Knesset. Covering issues such as voters' behaviour, coalition formation, figures of leadership, political identities, political communication and persuasion, this rich collection of essays offers a unique and comprehensive perspective on Israeli political culture in general, and on the Israeli society in the midst of the 2015 elections in particular. It also offers theoretical insight to anyone interested in parliamentary politics and party systems in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Israel Affairs.

The importance of social media as a way to monitor an electoral campaign is well established. Day-by-day, hour-by-hour evaluation of the evolution of online ideas and opinion allows observers and scholars to monitor trends and momentum in public opinion well before traditional polls. However, there are difficulties in recording and analyzing often brief, unverified comments while the unequal age, gender, social and racial representation among social media users can produce inaccurate forecasts of final polls. Reviewing the different techniques employed using social media to nowcast and forecast elections, this book assesses its achievements and limitations while presenting a new technique of "sentiment analysis" to improve upon them. The authors carry out a meta-analysis of the existing literature to show the conditions under which social media-based electoral forecasts prove most accurate while new case studies from France, the United States and Italy demonstrate how much more accurate "sentiment analysis" can prove.