This Handbook is the first major work to comprehensively map state-of-the-art scholarship on electoral debates in comparative perspective. Leading scholars and practitioners from around the world introduce a core theoretical and conceptual framework to understand this phenomenon and point to promising directions for new research on the evolution of electoral debates and the practical considerations that different country-level experiences can offer. Three indicators to help analyze electoral debates inform this Handbook: the level of experience of each country in the realization of electoral debates; geopolitical characteristics linked to political influence; and democratic stability and electoral competitiveness. Chapters with examples from the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Asia and Oceania add richness to the volume. Each chapter: Traces local historical, constitutive relationships between traditional forms of electoral debates and contexts of their emergence; Compares and critiques different perspectives regarding the function of debates on democracy; Probes, discusses and evaluates recent and emergent theoretical resources related to campaign debates in light of a particular local experience; Explores and assesses new or neglected local approaches to electoral debates in a changing media landscape where television is no longer the dominant form of political communication; Provides a prospective analysis regarding the future challengers for electoral debates. The Routledge International Handbook on Electoral Debates will set the agenda for scholarship on the political communication for years to come.

How did liberationist Christianity develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War? How did liberation theology develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War? Understanding the movement to be dynamic and highly diverse, this book reveals that ecclesial and political conflicts, especially over Peronism and celibacy, were at the heart of the construction of a liberationist Christian identity, which simultaneously internalised deep tensions over its relationship to the Catholic Church. It first situates the rise of a revolutionary Christian impulse in Argentina within changes in society, in Catholicism and Protestantism and in Marxism in the 1930s, before analysing how the phenomenon coalesced in the late sixties into a coherent social movement. Finally, the book examines the responses of liberationist Christians to the intense period of repression under the presidency of Isabel Peron and the rule of the military junta between 1974 and 1983. By exploring these distinct responses and uncovering the heterogeneity of liberationist Christianity, the book offers a fresh analysis of a movement that occupies a major role in the popular memory of the period of state terror, and provides a corrective to narratives that depict the movement as monolithic or as a passive victim of the dictatorship.

It is widely accepted that the machinery of multicultural societies and liberal democratic systems is dependent upon various forms of dialogue - dialogue between political parties, between different social groups, between the ruling and the ruled. But what are the conditions of a democratic dialogue and how does the philosophical dialogic approach apply to practice? Recently, facing challenges from mass protest movements across the globe, liberal democracy has found itself in urgent need of a solution to the problem of translating mass activity into dialogue, as well as that of designing borders of dialogue. Exploring the multifaceted nature of the concepts of dialogue and democracy, and critically examining materializations of dialogue in social life, this book offers a variety of perspectives on the theoretical and empirical interface between democracy and dialogue. Bringing together the latest work from scholars across Europe, Democracy in Dialogue, Dialogue in Democracy offers fresh theorizations of the role of dialogue in democratic thought and practice and will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and social and political theory.

Popular protests are on the rise in China. However, since protesters rely on existing channels of participation and on patronage by elite backers, the state has been able to stymie attempts to generalize resistance and no large scale political movements have significantly challenged party rule. Yet the Chinese state is not monolithic. Decentralization has increased the power of local authorities, creating space for policy innovations and opening up the political opportunity structure. Popular protest in China - particularly in urban realm- not only benefits from the political fragmentation of the state, but also from the political communications revolution. The question of how and to what extent the internet can be used for mobilizing popular resistance in China is hotly debated. The government, virtual social organizations, and individual netizens both cooperate and compete with each other on the web. New media both increases the scope of the mobilizers and the mobilized (thereby creating new social capital), and provides the government with new means of social control (thereby limiting the political impact of the growing social capital). This volume is the first of its kind to assess the ways new media influence the mobilization of popular resistance and its possible effects in China today.

The fifth edition of Gender and Elections offers a lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2020 elections. This timely yet enduring volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2020 elections and providing an in-depth analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding presidential, congressional, and state elections; voter participation, turnout, and choices; participation of African American women and Latinas; support of political parties and women's organizations; and candidate communication. New chapters explore the role of social movements in elections and introduce concepts of gendered and raced institutions, intersectionality, and identity politics applied to presidential elections from past to present. The resulting volume is the most comprehensive and reliable resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.

Cracked But Not Shattered: Hillary Rodham Clinton's Unsuccessful Campaign for the Presidency thoroughly analyzes Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination with an eye to identifying what went wrong why, as the frontrunner, she ended up not breaking "the glass ceiling." The volume's contributors examine multiple issues in attempt to answer this question, from usual campaign communication topics such as Clinton's rhetoric, debate performance, and advertising to the ways in which she was treated by the media. Although her communication was flawed and the media coverage of her did reflect biases, these essays demonstrate how Clinton's campaign was in trouble from the start because of her gender, status as a former First Lady, and being half of a political couple. Cracked But Not Shattered provides keen insight into the historic 2008 democratic primaries that will particularly intrigue scholars and students of political communications."

Investigating art practitioners' responses to violence, this book considers how artists have used art practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence. It explores the strategies that artists have deployed to expose physical and symbolic violence through representational, performative and interventional means. It examines how intellectual and material contexts have affected art interventions and how visual arts can open up critical spaces to explore violence without reinforcement or recuperation. Its premises are that art is not only able to contest prevailing norms about violence but that contemporary artists are consciously engaging with publics through their practice in order to do so. Contributors respond to three questions: how can political violence be understood or interpreted through art? How are publics understood or identified? How are art interventions designed to shift, challenge or respond to public perceptions of political violence and how are they constrained by them? They discuss violence in the everyday and at state level: the Watts' Rebellion and Occupy, repression in Russia, domination in Hong Kong, the violence of migration and the unfolding art activist logic of the sigma portfolio. Asking how public debates can be shaped through the visual and performing arts and setting taboos about violence to one side, the volume provides an innovative approach to a perennial issue of interest to scholars of international politics, art and cultural studies.

What is ISIS? A quasi-state? A terrorist group? A movement? An ideology? As ISIS has transformed and mutated, gained and lost territory, horrified the world and been its punch line, media have been central to understanding it. The changing, yet constant, relationship between ISIS and the media, as well as its adversaries' dependency on media to make sense of ISIS, is central to this book. More than just the images of mutilated bodies that garnered ISIS its initial infamy, the book considers an ISIS media world that includes infographics, administrative reports, and various depictions of a post-racial utopia in which justice is swift and candy is bought and sold with its own currency. The book reveals that the efforts of ISIS and its adversaries to communicate and make sense of this world share modes of visual, aesthetic, and journalistic practice and expression. The short tumultuous history of ISIS does not allow for a single approach to understanding its relation to media. Thus, the book's contributions are to be read as contrapuntal analyses that productively connect and disconnect, providing a much-needed complex account of the ISIS-media relationship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

This book explores situations when public opinion presents as an obstacle to the protection and promotion of human rights. Taking an International Law perspective, it primarily deals with two questions: first, whether international law requires States to take an independent stance on human rights issues; second, whether international law encourages states to inform and mobilize public opinion with regard to core human rights standards. The discussion is mainly organized within the framework of the UN system. The work is particularly relevant to situations in which public opinion appears as discriminatory attitudes based on race, gender, age, health, sexual orientation and other factors. It is also pertinent to circumstances when public opinion is responsible for the existence of certain harmful customs and practices such as female genital mutilation, and capital punishment. Noting that the death penalty is increasingly recognized as an infringement of human rights, this study further challenges States' argument that capital punishment cannot be abolished because of public opinion. The book also discusses the role that education bears under international law in moulding favourable attitudes towards human rights. Finally, the book challenges states' acceptance that public opinion cannot be confronted in this respect.

Cracked But Not Shattered: Hillary Rodham Clinton's Unsuccessful Campaign for the Presidency thoroughly analyzes Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination with an eye to identifying what went wrong_why, as the frontrunner, she ended up not breaking 'the glass ceiling.' The volume's contributors examine multiple issues in attempt to answer this question, from usual campaign communication topics such as Clinton's rhetoric, debate performance, and advertising to the ways in which she was treated by the media. Although her communication was flawed and the media coverage of her did reflect biases, these essays demonstrate how Clinton's campaign was in trouble from the start because of her gender, status as a former First Lady, and being half of a political couple. Cracked But Not Shattered provides keen insight into the historic 2008 democratic primaries that will particularly intrigue scholars and students of political communications.

This book is a comparison of two ethnic-national "apartheid" states ? South Africa and Israel ? which have been in conflict, and how internal dissent has developed. In particular it examines the evolution of effective white protest in South Africa and explores the reasons why comparably powerful movements have not emerged in Israel.

The book reveals patterns of behaviour shared by groups in both cases. It argues that although the role played by protest groups in peace-building may be limited, a tipping point, or ?magic point?, can become as significant as other major factors. It highlights the role played by intermediate variables that affect the pathways of protest groups: such as changes in the international system; the visions and strategies of resistance movements and their degree of success; the economic relationship between the dominant and dominated side; and the legitimacy of the ideology in power (apartheid or Zionism).

Although the politics and roles of protest groups in both cases share some similarities, differences remain. Whilst white protest groups moved towards an inclusive peace agenda that adopts the ANC vision of a united non-racial democratic South Africa, the Jewish Israeli protest groups are still, by majority, entrenched in their support for an exclusive Jewish state. And as such, they support separation between the two peoples and a limited division of mandatory Palestine / ?Eretz Israel?. This timely book sheds light on a controversial and explosive political issue: Israel being compared to apartheid South Africa.

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.

This book examines deformative transparency and its different manifestations in political communication, propaganda and public health. The objective is to present the theoretical foundations of deformative transparency, as grotesque and esperpentic transparency, and illustrate the validity of such approach to understand the strategic and ethical implications of the proactive disclosure of the "shocking", "ugly" or "outside the norm". Four areas are discussed: political communication with particular focus on populist politicians as the deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, and the tenure in office of the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford; propaganda strategies of Islamist terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State's escalation of the visually horrific; and public health campaigns that use "disturbing images" to promote public awareness and eventually influence behavioural change. This study on the transparently grotesque is part of a research program about the economy of emotions in public communication.

This book traces a century of militarised communication that began in the United States in April, 1917, with the institution of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by George Creel and tasked with persuading a divided US public to enter World War I. Creel achieved an historic feat of communication: a nationalising mass mediation event well before any instantaneous mass media technologies were available. The CPI's techniques and strategies have underpinned marketing, public relations, and public diplomacy practices ever since. The book argues that the CPI's influence extends unbroken into the present day, as it provided the communicative and attitudinal bases for a new form of political economy, a form of corporatism, that would come to its fullest flower in the "globalisation" project of the mid-1990s.

`The Rolls-Royce of opinion surveys' - The Times

The indispensable annual British Social Attitudes survey compiles, describes and comments on a range of current social attitudes. The series charts changes in British social values, with annual surveys carried out from a nationwide sample of around 3,500 people by the National Centre for Social Research's team of interviewers. The 19th Report summarizes and interprets data from the most recent survey, and makes comparisons with findings from previous years.

During the American Civil War, political ideology was the most important determinant of French journalistic attitudes. Conservatives usually supported the South while Liberals usually supported the North. Provincial newspapers, however, less consistently followed ideological patterns than their Parisian and big-city colleagues. Slavery was not a determinant of French attitudes, since all French were opposed to slavery; rather, both Conservatives and Liberals used the issue of slavery as a device to garner support. While Conservatives remained firm in believing that the South would prevail until the very end, Liberal journalists sometimes despaired of a Union triumph in the face of Northern military defeats.

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage provides the first sustained reading of Restoration plays through a performance theory lens. This approach shows that an analysis of the conjoined performances of torture and race not only reveals the early modern interest in the nature of racial identity, but also how race was initially coded in a paradoxical fashion as both essentially fixed and socially constructed. An examination of scenes of torture provides the most effective way to unearth these seemingly contradictory representations of race because depictions of torture often interrogate the incongruous desire to substitute the visible and manipulable materiality of the body for the more illusive performative nature of identity. In turn, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage challenges the long-standing assumption that early modern conceptions of race were radically different in their fluidity from post-Enlightenment ones by demonstrating how many of the debates we continue to have about the nature of racial identity were engendered by these seventeenth-century performances.

?Bruce I. Newman tells us briskly, firmly what our instincts also tell us: We are mass marketing images rather than providing real leadership.? --Paul Simon, Former U.S. Senator, Public Policy Institute, Southern Illinois University ?Gatorade and Coke do it, so do candidates for high office?they manufacture images and manipulate reality to win our favor. In this insightful and compelling study, Bruce I. Newman demonstrates what politicians and interest groups are doing to us and what we need to do to strengthen our democracy.? --Dennis W. Johnson, Associate Dean, George Washington University ?Bruce Newman has written an incisive account of the role that marketing plays in contemporary politics. He argues persuasively that mass marketing techniques are profoundly changing and corroding American politics. His book provides an enlightful analysis of the ways in which marketers have transformed the presidential election.? --Richard M. Perloff, author of Political Communication: Politics, Press and Public in America ?This book is a must read for anyone concerned about the growing trend of sound bite over substance, willful manipulation of the media over honest engagement of the American Public.? --David Wilhelm, Former Chair of the Democratic National Committee ?While marketing has led to better quality in most markets, we are beginning to have serious doubts about what is doing to the quality of political life. Bruce Newman raises serious questions about whether anyone of merit can get elected today without the support of expensive and sophisticated marketing machinery.? --Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Northwestern University Marketing, not ideology, drives America?s contemporary political system, with an emphasis on image over substance, personality over issues, and 30-second sound bites over meaningful dialogue. Through the use of carefully crafted messages meant to manipulate voter thinking, the same marketing tactics used by Fortune 500 companies is shaping public opinion. The Mass Marketing of Politics details how marketing tactics are being used to determine public opinion, win votes, and shape public policy in the White House and Congress. The book points out the pitfalls of relying too heavily on marketing as a campaign and governance tool and offers solutions to fix our political system before it is too late. Bruce I. Newman is the author of The Marketing of the President (Sage, 1993) and the forthcoming Handbook of Political Marketing. He has served as a communication advisor to top White House officials and has written widely on the subject of political marketing in both scholarly and popular media. The Mass Marketing of Politics is provocative and essential reading for anyone interested in American politics, marketing, political communication, and media studies.

Using the best scientific evidence, Drugs: America's Holy War explores the impact and cost of America's "War on Drugs" - both in tax spending and in human terms. Is it possible that US drug policies are helping to proliferate, not prevent, a multitude of social ills including: homicide, property crime, the spread of AIDS, the contamination of drugs, the erosion of civil liberties, the punishment of thousands of non-violent people, the corruption of public officials, and the spending of billions of tax dollars in an attempt to prevent certain drugs from entering the country? In this controversial new book, award-winning economist Arthur Benavie analyzes the research findings and argues that an end to the war on drugs, much as we ended alcohol prohibition, would yield enormous international benefits, destroy dangerous and illegal drug cartels, and allow the American government to refocus its attention on public well-being.

This book analyzes the relationship between political power and the media in a range of nation states in East and Southeast Asia, focusing in particular on the place of the media in authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes. It discusses the centrality of media in sustaining repressive regimes, and the key role of the media in the transformation and collapse of such regimes. It questions in particular the widely held beliefs, that the state can have complete control over the media consumption of its citizens, that commercialization of the media necessarily leads to democratization, and that the transnational, liberal dimensions of western media are crucial for democratic movements in Asia. Countries covered include Burma, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Using the best scientific evidence, Drugs: America's Holy War explores the impact and cost of Americaa (TM)s "War on Drugs" a " both in tax spending and in human terms. Is it possible that US drug policies are helping to proliferate, not prevent, a multitude of social ills including: homicide, property crime, the spread of AIDS, the contamination of drugs, the erosion of civil liberties, the punishment of thousands of non-violent people, the corruption of public officials, and the spending of billions of tax dollars in an attempt to prevent certain drugs from entering the country?

In this controversial new book, award-winning economist Arthur Benavie analyzes the research findings and argues that an end to the war on drugs, much as we ended alcohol prohibition, would yield enormous international benefits, destroy dangerous and illegal drug cartels, and allow the American government to refocus its attention on public well-being.

This volume investigates the relationship between protest, repression and political regimes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Considering how different political regimes use repression and respond to popular protest, this book analyzes the relationship between protest and repression in Africa and Latin America between the late 1970s and the beginning of the twenty first century. Drawing on theories, multi-method empirical analyses and case studies, the author of this volume sets out to investigate the reciprocal dynamics between protest and repression. Distinctive features of this volume include: quantitative analyses that highlight general trends in the protest-repression relationship case studies of different political regimes in Chile and Nigeria, emphasising the dynamics at the micro-level an emphasis on the importance of full democratization in order to reduce the risk, and intensity, of intra-state conflict Focusing on political regimes in different areas of the world, Protest, Repression and Political Regimes will be of vital interest to students and scholars of conflict studies, human rights and social movements.

Far from being the preserve of a few elite thinkers, critique increasingly dominates public life in modernity, leading to a cacophony of accusation and denunciation around all political issues. The technique of unmasking 'power' or 'hegemony' or 'ideology' has now been adopted across the political spectrum, where critical discourses are routinely used to suggest that anything and everything is only a 'construct' or even a 'conspiracy'. This book draws on anthropological theory to provide a different perspective on this phenomenon; critique appears as a liminal predicament combining imitative polemical and schismatic urges with a haunting sense of uncertainty. It thereby addresses a central academic concern, with a special focus on political critique in the public sphere and within social media. Combining historical interrogations of the roots of critique, as well as examining contemporary political discourse in relation to populism, as seen in presidential elections, historical commemorations and welfare reform, The Spectacle of Critique uses anthropology and genealogy to offer a new sociology of critique that problematises critique and diagnoses its crisis, cultivating acritical and imaginative ways of thinking.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes-a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers-a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them-if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.

The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.