The prominence of politically-themed entertainment is evident across the global media landscape. Given its popularity, it is important to gain a firm understanding of the mechanisms through which this diverse and multi-faceted content can generate democratic outcomes. In addition, it is essential to isolate and predict properly the strength of a given effect and the conditions under which a specific outcome will become evident. The works contained in this edited volume explore affect- and cognition-driven processes of influence, recognizing that humans are both emotional and rational beings. In addition, empirical evidence is offered to isolate and compare specific types of political entertainment media content (e.g., different types of satire) and citizens' proclivities for this content (e.g., a person's Affinity for Political Humor), in order to best understand the complex means by which entertainment media can generate political influence. Attention is also paid to expanding what can and should be defined as "political entertainment" media, which includes opinion-based political talk programming. The collection and its authors represent a global perspective to reflect the rise of political entertainment media as a global phenomenon. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.

"Compelling." The Guardian "An insightful and inspiring history." BBC History Magazine "A tantalising revelatory book." The House "Brisk and illuminating." Times Literary Supplement "A damn good read." Morning Star "Wonderful." The Chartist Uncontrollable Women is a history of radical, reformist and revolutionary women between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Very few of them are well-known today; some were unknown even in their own day. All of them contributed something to the world we now inhabit. At a time when women were supposed to leave politics to men they spoke, wrote, marched, organised, asked questions, challenged power structures, sometimes went to prison and even died. History has not usually been kind to them, and they have frequently been pushed into asides or footnotes, dismissed as secondary, or spoken over, for, or through by men and sometimes other women. In this book, they take centre stage in both their own stories and those of others, and in doing so bring different voices to the more familiar accounts of the period. These women and many others played a part in developing political ideas and freedoms as we know them today, and some fought battles which still remain to be won or raised questions that are still unresolved. These are their stories.

The Resilient Voter: Stressful Polling Places and Voting Behavior provides a new perspective on the role voting barriers play, demonstrating that they not only discourage participation but also affect the quality of votes cast. Offering an interesting and unique approach to the study of voting barriers, Shauna Reilly and Stacy G. Ulbig investigate the possibility that complicated ballot language, provisional voting, and long polling place lines cause some voters to cast ballots in a manner contradictory to their preferences. Building on arguments that stressful polling place conditions subject citizens to stress that can prevent them from casting complete ballots or even choosing to vote at all, the authors ask whether those who endure polling place frustrations and persevere to cast a ballot might become so stressed by their experience that they are unable to mark their ballots in a manner consistent with their standing policy preferences. Using a creative experimental design, the authors examine the ways in which complex ballot language, registration difficulties, and long polling place lines affect voters' stress levels, and how such anxieties translate into the willingness to cast a complete ballot and the ability to vote in a manner conforming to previously expressed preferences. The authors demonstrate that even though most voters prove remarkably resilient in the face of some potentially stressful polling place barriers, they are not immune to all polling place conditions. Further, they illustrate that some segments of the electorate tend to be more vulnerable to polling place stressors than others and illustrate the ways in which the compound effects of multiple barriers can exert an even wider impact.

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy. They are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This Oxford Handbook takes on the 'big questions' about public opinion and the media-both empirical and normative-focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Bringing together the thinking of a team of leading academic experts, its chapters provide a cutting assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections. Emphasizing changes in the mass media and communications technology-the vast number of cable channels, websites and blogs, and the new social media, which are changing how news about political life is collected and conveyed-they describe the evolving information interdependence of the media and public opinion. In addition, the volume reviews the wide range of influences on public opinion, including the processes by which information communicated through the media can affect the public. It describes what has been learned from the latest research in psychology, genetics, and studies of the impact of gender, race and ethnicity, economic status, education and sophistication, religion, and generational change on a wide range of political attitudes and perceptions. The Handbook includes extensive discussion of how public opinion and mass media coverage are studied through survey research and increasingly through experiments using the latest technological advances. The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics. Each volume focuses on a particular aspect of the field. The project is under the General Editorship of George C. Edwards III, and distinguished specialists in their respective fields edit each volume. The Handbooks aim not just to report on the discipline, but also to shape it as scholars critically assess the scholarship on a topic and propose directions in which it needs to move. The series is an indispensable reference for anyone working in American politics.

The Internet is facilitating a generational transition within America's advocacy group system. New "netroots" political associations have arisen in the past decade and play an increasingly prominent role in citizen political mobilization. At the same time, the organizations that mediate citizen political engagement and sustained collective action are changing. They rely upon modified staff structures and work routines. They employ novel strategies and tactical repertoires. Rather than "organizing without organizations," the new media environment has given rise to "organizing through different organizations."
The MoveOn Effect provides a richly detailed analysis of this disruptive transformation. It highlights changes in membership and fundraising regimes - established industrial patterns of supporter interaction and revenue streams - that were pioneered by MoveOn.org and have spread broadly within the advocacy system. Through interviews, content analysis, and direct observation of the leading netroots organizations, the book offers fresh insights into 21st century political organizing.
The book highlights important variations among the new organizations - including internet-mediated issue generalists like MoveOn, community blogs like DailyKos.com, and neo-federated groups like DemocracyforAmerica.com. It also explores a wider set of netroots infrastructure organizations that provide supporting services to membership-based advocacy associations.
The rise of the political netroots has had a distinctly partisan character: conservatives have repeatedly tried and failed to build equivalents to the organizations and infrastructure of the progressive netroots. The MoveOn Effect investigates these efforts, as well as the late-forming Tea Party movement, and introduces the theory of Outparty Innovation Incentives as an explanation for the partisan adoption of political technology.
Written by a political scientist who is also a longtime political organizer, The MoveOn Effect offers a widely-accessible account of the Internet's impact on American politics. Operating at the intersection of practitioner and academic knowledge-traditions, Karpf provides a reassessment of many longstanding claims about new media and citizen political engagement.

Social media has many advantages for professional communication - but it also carries considerable risks, including legal pitfalls. This book equips students and communication professionals with the knowledge and skills to help minimise the risks that can arise when they post or host on social media. It offers them strategies for taking advantage of the opportunities of social media while also navigating the ethical, legal, and organisational risks that can lead to audience outrage, brand damage, expensive litigation and communication crises. The book uses stakeholder theory and risk analysis tools to anticipate, identify, address and balance these opportunities and risks. It takes a global approach to risk and social media law, drawing on fascinating case studies from key international jurisdictions to explain and illustrate the basic principles. Whether you are a corporate communicator, social media manager, journalist, marketer, blogger or student you will find this book an essential addition to your professional library as the first reference point when social media and legal risks arise.

It is widely assumed that a competitive political environment of public distrust and critical media forces political parties to manage communications and reputations strategically, but is this really true? Comprehensive control of communications in a fast-moving political and media setting isoften upset by events outside the communicator's control, taking over the news agenda andchanging the political narrative. Based on interviews with leading communicators and journalists, this book explores the tensions between a planned, strategic communications approach and a reactive, tactical one. The interviewees, who over the past 15 years have been instrumental in presenting and shaping the public persona of party leaders and Prime Ministers, include, amongst others, William Hague, Ian Duncan-Smith, Michael Howard, David Cameron, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.It draws a unique picture of how political reputations are managed and, ultimately, confirms the discrepancy between what political communications management is thought to be, and how communications practitioners actually operate. This book empirically reviews political communications practice in order to analyse to what degree reality matches the concepts of strategic communications management. This will be essential reading for researchers, educators and advanced students in public relations, communications studies and marketing.

The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously - or conventionally assumed to be - disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media. Interactive websites allow users to follow election results in real-time from the other side of the world, and online mapping means that the world 'out there' is now available on your mobile phone. Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age engages these themes in contemporary world politics, to better understand how digital communication through new media technologies changes our encounters with the world. Whether the focus is digital media, social networking or user-generated content, these sites of political activity and the artefacts they produce have much to tell us about how we engage world politics in the contemporary age. This volume represents the starting point of a dialogue about how digital technologies are beginning to impact the research and practice of scholars and practitioners in the field of International Relations, with the collection of cutting-edge essays dealing specifically with the intertextuality of world politics and digital popular culture. This book will be of use to International Relations research academics (and critically engaged publics) interested in the core themes of global politics - subjectivity, militarism, humanitarianism, civil society organisation, and governance. The book also employs theories and techniques closely associated with other social science disciplines, including political theory, sociology, cultural studies and media studies.

Drawing on case studies from around the world, contributors to this ground-breaking book explore a major contemporary paradox: on the one hand, young people today are at the forefront of political campaigns promoting social rights and ethical ideas that challenge authoritarian orders and elite privileges. On the other hand, too many governments, some claiming to be committed to liberal-democratic values, social inclusion and youth participation are engaged in repressing political activities that contest the status quo. Contributors to this book explore how, especially since 9/11, governments, state agencies and other traditional power holders around the globe have reacted to political dissent authored by young people. While the 'need' to enhance 'youth political participation' is promoted, the cases in this book document how states are using everything from surveillance, summary offences, expulsion from universities, 'gag laws' and 'antiterrorism' legislation, and even imprisonment to repress certain forms of young people's political activism. These responses diminish the public sphere and create civic spaces hostile to political participation by any citizen. This book forms part of The Criminalization of Political Dissent series. It documents and interprets the many ways contemporary governments and agencies now routinely use various techniques to repress and criminalise political dissent.

Around the developing world, political leaders face a dilemma: the very information and communication technologies that boost economic fortunes also undermine power structures. Globally, one in ten internet users is a Muslim living in a populous Muslim community. In these countries, young people are developing their political identities-including a transnational Muslim identity-online. In countries where political parties are illegal, the internet is the only infrastructure for democratic discourse. In others, digital technologies such as mobile phones and the internet have given key actors an information infrastructure that is independent of the state. And in countries with large Muslim communities, mobile phones and the internet are helping civil society build systems of political communication independent of the state and beyond easy manipulation by cultural or religious elites. This book looks at the role that communications technologies play in advancing democratic transitions in Muslim countries. As such, its central question is whether technology holds the potential to substantially enhance democracy. Certainly, no democratic transition has occurred solely because of the internet. But, as Philip Howard argues, no democratic transition can occur today without the internet. According to Howard, the major (and perhaps only meaningful) forum for civic debate in most Muslim countries today is online. Activists both within diasporic communities and within authoritarian states, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, are the drivers of this debate, which centers around issues such as the interpretation of Islamic texts, gender roles, and security issues. Drawing upon material from interviews with telecommunications policy makers and activists in Azerbaijan, Egypt, Tajikistan and Tanzania and a comparative study of 74 countries with large Muslim populations, Howard demonstrates that these forums have been the means to organize activist movements that have lead to successful democratic insurgencies.

Barack Obama's stunning victory in the 2008 presidential election will go down as one of the more pivotal in American history. Given America's legacy of racism, how could a relatively untested first-term senator with an African father defeat some of the giants of American politics?
In The Obama Victory, Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson draw upon the best voter data available, The National Annenberg Election Survey, as well as interviews with key advisors to each campaign, to illuminate how media, money, and messages shaped the 2008 election. In a crisp, incisive narrative, the authors identify the candidates' major themes--Maverick versus Mc-Same; Change versus Tax and Spend Liberal, etc.--and then apply them to the five main periods of the campaign: the early summer; the period from the vice presidential nominations through the conventions; the financial meltdown from mid-September to mid-October; the two weeks after the final debate; and the final week. Throughout, they explain how both sides worked the media to reinforce or combat images of McCain as too old and Obama as not ready; how Obama used a very effective rough-and-tumble radio and cable campaign that was largely unnoticed by the mainstream media; how the Vice Presidential nominees impacted the campaign; how McCain's age and Obama's race affected the final vote, and much more. Analyzing each nominee's broadcast, cable, and radio spending, the authors conclude that Obama's media campaign was more savvy than McCain's, and that early voting and the complete collapse of campaign finance reform will change elections for years to come.
Briskly written and filled with surprising insights, The Obama Victory goes beyond opinion to offer the most authoritative account available of precisely how and why Obama won the presidency.

Are celebrity politics the spice of American public life or a pox on policy progress? This book identifies and measures the attributes of celebrities that make them well-equipped to win campaigns and yet poorly prepared to govern effectively. The framers of the U.S. Constitution worried about the propensity of an undereducated public to elect unqualified entertainers rather than fit characters to government positions. Celebrities have come to play an increasingly central role in the American political process as fundraisers, surrogates, and as candidates themselves, yet remain a sorely understudied topic in political science. Through a multimethod approach that includes qualitative analysis, novel public opinion surveys, and survey experiments, this book assesses whether Americans are more likely to vote for celebrities than well-known traditional politicians and the implications of these preferences for democracy in the U.S. Perfect for students, scholars, and interested citizens, Star Power looks at the contemporary American political landscape through new lenses of research as well as popular appeal.

This book analyses dissent and its manifestations in movements of social and political transformation across communities and cultures. It shows how these movements create ruptures in the structures of power, and social hierarchy; expressed through songs, slogans, poetry and performances. The chapters in the book explore these sites of transgression and the imprint they leave on culture, politics, beliefs and the collective society - via music and poetry as in the Bhakti movement or through feministic theories born in post-World War Europe. It also explores how these dynamic movements generate alternate spaces within which the self, identity and collective purpose take new forms and find new meanings as they travel. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the humanities, literature, history, sociology, politics and culture studies.

In recent years, scholars have argued that the ability of people to choose which channel they want to watch means that television news is just preaching to the choir, and doesn't change any minds. However, this book shows that the media still has an enormous direct impact on American society and politics. While past research has emphasized the indirect effects of media content on attitudes - through priming or framing, for instance - Dan Cassino argues that past data on both the public opinion and the media side wasn't detailed enough to uncover it. Using a combination of original national surveys, large scale content analysis of news coverage along with data sets as disparate as FBI gun background checks and campaign contribution records, Cassino discusses why it's important to treat different media sources separately, estimating levels of ideological bias for television media sources as well as the differences in the topics that the various media sources cover. Taking this into account proves that exposure to some media sources can serve to actually make Americans less knowledgeable about current affairs, and more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. Even in an era of declining viewership, the media - especially Fox News - are shaping our society and our politics. This book documents how this is happening, and shows the consequences for Americans. The quality of journalism is more than an academic question: when coverage focuses on questionable topics, or political bias, there are consequences.

Mass media are essential to democratic society; in contrast, the War on Terror has been interpreted as an assault on democracy and freedom by Islamic fundamentalists. The building and maintenance of public support is essential in modern warfare due to the increasing politicization of warfare, where losses and gains are measured in political rather than military terms. And if progress cannot be demonstrated during a war, then by default one is assumed to be losing. Greg Simons tackles the complicated yet essential role of mass media in society. Taking the Global War on Terror as a prime example, the author adopts a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the various facets of war and the role of the media within it. Assessing in particular the Russian fight against terrorism, this book provides a broader perspective and understanding of contemporary struggles.

Electing a Mega-Mayor represents the first-ever comprehensive, survey-based examination of a Canadian mayoral race and provides a unique, detailed account of the 2014 mayoral election in Toronto. After making the case that local elections deserve more attention from scholars of political behaviour, this book offers readers an understanding of Toronto politics at the time of the 2014 election and presents relevant background on the major candidates. It considers the importance that Torontonians attached to policy concerns and identifies the bases of support for the outgoing, scandal-ridden mayor, Rob Ford, and his brother Doug. In the penultimate chapter, the authors examine how Torontonians viewed their elected officials, and the city's performance, two years after the election. McGregor, Moore, and Stephenson conclude with a reflection on what the analysis of the Toronto 2014 election says about voters in large cities in general and provide a short epilogue addressing the 2018 election results. Written in an accessible style, this is the first book on the politics of Toronto during the Ford era that focuses on the perspective of the voter.

Populist Discourse brings together experts from both linguistics and political science to analyse the language of populist leaders and the media's representation of populism in different temporal, geographical and ideological contexts, including Nazi Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Greece, the UK, the US and South America. With 17 contributions split into four sections, Populist Discourse covers a variety of approaches such as corpus-based discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and political perspectives, making it a timely dissection for students and researchers working in linguistics, political science and communication.

Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences and humanities. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Data-Politics-Worlds-Subjects-Rights/Bigo-Isin-Ruppert/p/book/9781138053267, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Alan Schroeder's big-picture history recounts the phenomenon of American televised presidential debates and its evolution over the past half century. From pundits to political operatives, from debate moderators to the viewing public, Presidential Debates reveals how the various stakeholders make and experience this powerful event. For this third edition, Schroeder analyzes the presidential debates of 2008 and 2012 and the crucial role that social media and contemporary news outlets had in shaping their design and reception. He also expands his coverage of previous campaigns, including the landmark meetings in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Schroeder details an insider's view of the key phases of the debate: anticipation, in which the campaigns negotiate rules, formulate strategy, and steer press coverage; execution, in which the candidates, moderators, panelists, and television professionals create and project the event; and reaction, in which the commentators, spin doctors, and viewers evaluate the performance and move story lines in new directions. New chapters focus on real-time debate responses and the extent to which postdebate news coverage influences voters' decision making and candidates' behavior.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today's writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?" To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords: Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real) Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee) Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed) Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules) Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation) Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda) End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy) Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this). These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre. Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women's studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

This book examines democracy and governance from the unconventional and largely under researched vantage point of information. It looks at the exclusionary informational dynamics in democracy and analyses the role of information capitalism, new technology, virtual networks, cyberspace and media. While emphasizing the foundational value of information as the 'source code' of modern societies the book explains how it is strategically maneuvered in technologies of governance in so-called established and credible democracies. It studies the neutralization and subversion as well as the complex, nuanced and multidimensional act of othering of people, who are supposed to be the repository of power in democracy and in whose interest the business of governance is expected to be conducted. The work highlights the challenges of technocratic interpretations, stunted public policy communication, hyped information society, cooption through the state-of-the-art capitalism, rhetoric of virtual networks and the often-unilateral agenda of mainstream media. A major intervention in understanding the nature of contemporary democracy and polity, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, media, political communication and technology studies.

Within many societies across the world, new social and political movements have sprung up that either challenge formal parliamentary structures of democracy and participation, or work within them and, in the process, fundamentally alter the ideological content of democratic potentials. At the same time, some parliamentary political parties have attracted a new type of 'populist' political rhetoric and support base. This collection, along with its accompanying volume 2, examines the emergence of, and the connections between, these new types of left-wing democracy and participation. Through an array of examples from different countries, it explains why left-wing activism arises in new and innovative spaces in society and how this joins up with conventional left-wing politics, including parliamentary politics. It demonstrates how these new forms of politics can resonate with the real life experiences of ordinary people and thereby win support for left-wing agendas.

Media coverage of climate change has attracted much scholarly attention because the extent of such coverage has an agenda-setting effect and because the ways in which the coverage is framed can influence public perception of and engagement with the issue. However, certain gaps in our understanding of the processes whereby such coverage is produced remain. The competition among strategic actors to influence media framing strategies is poorly understood, and the perspectives of journalists and editors are largely absent from literature. With a view to advancing our understanding of the "frame competition" around climate change and to presenting the perspectives of journalists regarding climate change as a journalistic topic, this book presents an in-depth case history of media coverage of climate change in Ireland. First, the extent of media attention for climate change is established, and the way in which such coverage is framed is also examined. Through a series of interviews, including rare and privileged access to government ministers, their media advisors, and journalists and editors, the book uncovers the contest to establish a dominant framing. The main objective of this book is to advance our understanding of the contest to establish the dominant framing of climate change in the media discourse. Although focussed on Ireland, its conclusions are of value to those seeking to better understand the dynamics of media coverage of climate change in other contexts. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy, media and communication studies, and Irish politics.

The Arctic is 5.5 million square miles and has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, yet it is still a frontier of development. But who owns the Arctic? This book charts the history of performances of sovereignty over the Arctic in the policy and visual representations of the US, Canada and Russia. Focusing on narratives of the effective occupation of territory found in postage stamps, it offers a novel analysis of Arctic sovereignty. Issues such as climate change, plastics pollution and resource development continue to impact the future of this space centred around the North Pole. Who is responsible for the region? This book examines how countries have absorbed Arctic territory into their national consciousness, examining the choice of, and use of, symbols and images in postage stamps. It looks at the story of how these countries have represented their Arctic frontiers and territorial peripheries. The book argues that the performance of policy in these regions has caused relative sovereignty to become a reality. It provides an intriguing account of how these countries have, in their distinctive ways, established, legitimised and reinforced their political authority in these regions. This book will appeal to Geographers and is recommended supplementary reading for students in political history and regional studies of the North.