WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in over 80% of countries in West Africa, and a daily port of call for a wide range of information and services. This edited collection seeks to examine the impact that this transformative technology has had beyond the much-discussed role it has played in the spread of misinformation, and explore more widely the fundamental changes that WhatsApp has brought to many citizens' lives in social, economic and political contexts. Ranging across subjects including political organisation, religious practice, and family relations, each author in this volume brings direct knowledge and testimony of the impact of WhatsApp across West African society.

The study of elections, voting behavior and public opinion are arguably among the most prominent and intensively researched sub-fields within Political Science. It is an evolving sub-field, both in terms of theoretical focus and in particular, technical developments and has made a considerable impact on popular understanding of the core components of liberal democracies in terms of electoral systems and outcomes, changes in public opinion and the aggregation of interests. This handbook details the key developments and state of the art research across elections, voting behavior and the public opinion by providing both an advanced overview of each core area and engaging in debate about the relative merits of differing approaches in a comprehensive and accessible way. Bringing geographical scope and depth, with comparative chapters that draw on material from across the globe, it will be a key reference point both for advanced level students and researchers developing knowledge and producing new material in these sub-fields and beyond. The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion is an authoritative and key reference text for students, academics and researchers engaged in the study of electoral research, public opinion and voting behavior.

An indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao's decade of madness.

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Red Memory explores the stories of those driven to confront the era, who fear or yearn for its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

"This book has no scholarly equivalent in English." . Choice

The Nazis saw film as a major vehicle for both indoctrination and escapist pacification of the "masses"; in fact, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to create a German counter-Hollywood. This highly acclaimed study, by one of Germany's leading commentators and authors on cultural policy, analyses the pictorial and spoken language of the various film genres in the Third Reich, including news reels, documentaries, feature and "cultural" films. It shows how a powerful and sinister propaganda machine emerged which, by deploying a wide range of psychological techniques, exerted a strong fascination on the masses. These methods were so successful that they continue to serve as models for totalitarian regimes to this day.

- The Gallup Organization has a solid track record of successful business books, including two recent Warner Books titles: "Discover Your Sales Strengths (3/03), which has 40,000 copies in print, and "Follow this Path (10/02), which has over 60,000 copies in print- Other bestselling Gallup titles include "First, Break all the Rules (Simon & Schuster, 1999), which has sold over 500,000 hardcover copies and was a "New York Times and "Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and "Now, Discover Your Strengths (Simon & Schuster, 2001), which sold over 300,000 hardcover copies.- By examining how public opinion is influenced, POLLING MATTERS will appeal to the same large audience as Malcolm Gladwell's runaway "New York Times bestseller "The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Company, 2000), now in its 16th hardcover printing, with 693,000 copies in hardcover and paperback print combined.- Frank Newport is editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll and a frequent guest expert on CNN.- Timed to coincide with the 2004 presidential election, this book is perfectly positioned for maximum reader interest and media exposure.

The 2020 US presidential race was one of the most hotly contested and contentious in recent American history. While the election produced the greatest turnout in American history and the highest percentage turnout in 60 years, the election still came down to a handful of swing states that ultimately decided the election. In their third edition of Presidential Swing States, Rafael Jacob and David Schultz examine the 2020 presidential election, keying in on the few critical states that actually decided the election and why. With cases studies written by prominent political scientists who are experts on these swing states, Presidential Swing States also explains why some states were swing states but no longer are, why some continue to be swing states, and what states beyond 2020 may be the future swing states that decide the presidency. The book contains in-depth case studies of the swing-states and swing-counties that decide presidential elections in the United States. Students in classes on American Politics and Government, Parties, Campaigns and Elections, State Politics, and the Presidency will all be well-served by the analyses in this volume, as will journalists reporting on presidential elections, and the general public.

This book analyzes the development of the Stalinist state of the 1930s from the perspective of the changing nature of center-local relations. It examines the trend toward greater central state control over the formation and implementation of economic policy and the shift toward increased state repression through a series of archive-based case studies of the center's interactions with its republican and regional bodies. The book provides the basis for a new conceptualization of the Stalinist state.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

Social work is often presented as a benevolent and politically neutral profession, avoiding discussion about its sometimes troubling political histories. This book rethinks social work's legacy and history of both political resistance and complicity with oppressive and punitive practices. Using a comparative approach with international case studies, the book uncovers the role of social workers in politically tense episodes of recent history including the anti-racist struggle in the US and the impact of colonialism in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the de-colonisation of curricula and Black Lives Matter movement gain momentum, the fascinating book skilfully navigates social work's collective political past while considering its future.

The 2016 elections called into question the accuracy of public opinion polling while tapping into new streams of public opinion more widely. The third edition of this well-established text addresses these questions and adds new perspectives to its authoritative line-up. The hallmark of this book is making cutting-edge research accessible and understandable to students and general readers. Here we see a variety of disciplinary approaches to public opinion reflected including psychology, economics, sociology, and biology in addition to political science. An emphasis on race, gender, and new media puts the elections of 2016 into context and prepares students to look ahead to 2020 and beyond. New to the third edition: * Includes 2016 election results and their implications for public opinion polling going forward. * Three new chapters have been added on racializing politics, worldview politics, and the modern information environment. * New authors include Shanto Iyengar, Michael Tesler, Vladimir E. Medenica, Erin Cikanek, Danna Young, Jennifer Jerit, and Jake Haselswerdt.

How do governments that do not enjoy formal diplomatic relations use propaganda? When a government is denied recognition by the international community, it must explore every avenue of publicity available to project its image and policies. For such actors, propaganda can become diplomacy out of necessity. The Republic of China on Taiwan is such a government, and its predicament is the subject of this book. It discusses the relationship between diplomacy and propaganda from an exciting new perspective, illustrated by a fascinating case-study.

The one percent has been providing an ever larger share of campaign funds since the 1980s. Well over half of the money contributed to the presidential race in 2015 came from only about 350 families. One-fourth of it came from just seventy-eight donors, all of whom made contributions of $1 million or more. Can we still say we live in a democracy if a few hundred rich families provide such disproportionate shares of campaign funds? Congress and the courts are divided on that question, with conservatives saying yes and liberals saying no. The debate is about the most fundamental of political questions: how we define democracy, and how we want our democracy to work. The debate may ultimately be about political theory, but in practice it is conducted in terms of laws, regulations, and court decisions about PACs, super PACs, 527s, 501(c)(4)s, dark money, the Federal Election Commission, and even the IRS. This book explains how those laws, regulations, and court decisions fit into the larger debate about how we want our democracy to work.

In theory, parliamentary elections are a contest between political parties whose leaders do not have a separate identity from their party in the public eye. This case study of Britain shows that this theory no longer holds; the dynamics of parliamentary elections have become more 'presidential' in the sense that the leaders of the major parties now figure more prominently on both media coverage of the campaign and in the party that voters choose at the polls. The implications for our understanding of parliamentary democracy are discussed.

This volume explores the conflict between two forces: party polarization and party factionalism. The major change in America's two political parties over the past half-century has been increased polarization, which has led to a new era of heightened inter-party competition resulting in stronger and more cohesive parties. At the same time, elections, particularly primaries, often reveal deep internal factional divisions within both the parties, and the 2020 election was no different. The Democratic coalition typically pits moderate or establishment candidates against progressive activists and candidates, while the Republican Party in 2020 was, at times, polarized not only between moderates and conservatives but between those willing to criticize President Trump and those who would not. How did these two opposing forces shape the outcome of the 2020 election, and what are the consequences for the future of American party politics and elections?

Using recently declassified sources, this book provides the first detailed analysis of British and American propaganda, targeting the countries of the Middle East, during the years of increasing international tension and regional instability, immediately following the end of the Second World War. Considering British and American propaganda within the framework of the Cold War crusade against Communism and the Soviet Union, and the developing confrontations between Arab nationalism and the West, the book investigates the central questions of Anglo-American partnership and rivalry in the period when primary responsibility for 'policing' the Middle East passed from one to the other.

Social exclusion of minority groups is an intractable problem in many diverse nations. For some minority groups this means going to segregated schools, for others not having access to gainful employment or quality healthcare. But why does social exclusion persist, and what can one do to stop it? This book proposes a theory of how individual behavior contributes to social exclusion, a novel method for measuring that behavior, and solutions to ending it. Based on original fieldwork among Central and Eastern European Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Europe (yet still very understudied), and non-Roma, Ana Bracic develops a theory she calls the exclusion cycle, through which anti-minority culture gives rise to discrimination by members of the majority, and minority members develop survival strategies. Members of the majority resent these strategies, assuming that they are endemic to the minority group rather than an outcome of their own discriminatory behavior. To illustrate her theory, Bracic includes an analysis of a video game she created that simulates interactions between Roma and non-Roma participants, which members of these groups played through avatars (thereby avoiding contentious face-to-face interactions). The results demonstrate that majority members discriminate against minority members even when minority group members behave in ways identical to the majority. It also shows the way in which minority members develop survival mechanisms. Bracic draws on the results of the simulation to offer evidence that this cycle can be broken through NGO-promoted discussion and interaction between groups. She also draws on extant scholarship on interactions between Muslim women in France, African Americans, the Batwa in Uganda, and their respective majority communities.

Since Nimmo and Savage's groundbreaking work, "Candidates and Their Images" (1976), there has been no book dedicated solely to the examination of political candidate images. This volume adds to the development of the candidate image construct initiated by Nimmo and Savage. It provides a compendium of state-of-the-art theory and research of candidate images and image formation in the U.S. presidential elections. The contributors to this work, among the best-known in the field of political communication, describe and explain how presidential election results hinge on voter perceptions of candidates and how candidates seek to construct images that attract the most votes. The volume integrates issues of voter decision-making, media messages, campaigning, debate effects, and political advertising into the development of political communication theory. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of political communication.

Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years old when he died. He spent almost nine years of his life in prison because of his Irish republican activities. He died, in prison, on 5 May 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike at Long Kesh, outside Belfast. This book documents a day in the life of Bobby Sands. It is a tale of human bravery, endurance and courage against a backdrop of suffering, terror and harassment. It will live on as a constant reminder of events that should never have happened -- and will hopefully never happen again.

Was there such a thing as 'public opinion' before the age of newspapers and party politics? The essays in this collection show that in the Low Countries, at least, there certainly was. In this highly urbanised society, with high literacy rates and good connections, news and public debate could spread fast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enabling the growth of powerful opposition movements against the Crown, the creation of the Dutch Republic, and of the distinctive Netherlandish culture of the Golden Age. Contributors include: Hugh Dunthorne, Raingard Esser, Jonathan Israel, Gustaaf Janssens, Henk van Nierop, Guido Marnef, M.E.H. Nicolette Mout, Andrew Pettegree, Judith Pollmann, Paul Regan*, Andrew Sawyer*, Jo Spaans, Andrew Spicer*, and Juliaan Woltjer. (* Supervised by Alastair Duke)

Forged over the course of a century, the connections between war and media run long and deep. As this book reveals, the history of war and its telling has been a battle over public perception. The selection of which stories are told and which are ignored helps justify past battles and ensure future wars. Narratives of protest and pain, defeat and suffering, guilt and abuse struggle to be heard amid the empowering myths of war and heroism. As Robin Andersen argues, the history of struggle between war and its representation has changed the way war is fought and the way we tell the stories of war. Information management, once called censorship and propaganda, has developed in tandem with new media technologies. Now, digital imaging creates virtual battlefields as computer-based technologies transform the weapons of war. Along the way, images on the nightly news, on movie screens, and in video games have turned war into entertainment. In the grip of virtual war, it is difficult to realize the loss of compassion or the consequences for democracy.

This timely book investigates Black-Jewish estrangement and the erosion of Black support for Israel. Topics such as the response of Afro-Americans to the early Zionist movement; the emergence of the Jewish state in the Middle East; the attitudes of such Black luminaries as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Edward Wilmot Blyden; and Black reactions to the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 are chronicled and analyzed. The normalization of relations between Israel and the Republic of South Africa in recent years is examined along with Israel's ties with Black African countries, links between Arab and African nations and South Africa, and alleged Israeli military and nuclear collaboration with the apartheid regime. Another chapter looks at the friction between the Israeli government and a sect of Black Hebrew Israelites from the United States who settled in the Negev and at Black American involvement in the matter. The considerable effect that clashes over domestic questions, most notably affirmative action, have had on Black perceptions is also considered, as is the controversy between Jesse Jackson and the Jewish community.

In many elections, candidates frame their appeals in gendered ways-they compete, for instance, over who is more "masculine." This is the case for male and female candidates alike. In the 2016 presidential election, however, the stark choice between the first major-party female candidate and a man who exhibited a persistent pattern of misogyny made the use of gender more prominent than in any previous election in the United States. Presidential campaigns often have an impact on downballot Congressional races, but the 2016 election provided a new opportunity to see the effects of misogyny. While much has been written about the 2016 election-and the shadow of 2016 clearly affected the pool of candidates in the 2018 midterms-this book looks at how the Trump and Clinton campaigns actually changed the behavior of more conventional candidates for Congress in 2016 and 2018. Over the past decade, those who study political parties have sought to understand changes in the relationship between groups and parties and how these changes have affected the ability of parties to develop coherent campaign strategies. The clear need for rapid adjustments in party strategy in the 2016 election provides an ideal means of testing whether today's political parties are more able or less able to respond to unexpected events. This book argues that Donald Trump's candidacy radically altered the nature of the 2016 congressional campaigns in two ways. First, it changed the issues of contention in many of these races. Trump's provocative calls for building a wall along the Mexican border and temporarily prohibiting immigration from Muslim countries inserted issues of race and ethnicity into elections and forced candidates to respond to his proposals. Most consequentially, however, Trump's attacks on women-including television personalities, politicians, and, at times, private citizens-alienated numerous potential supporters and placed many of his supporters (and downballot Republican candidates in particular) on the defensive. Second, expectations that Trump would lose the election influenced how candidates for lower office campaigned and how willing they were to connect their fortunes to those of their party's nominee. The fact that Trump was expected to lose-and was expected to lose in large part because of his misogyny-caused both major parties to direct more of their resources toward congressional races, and led many Republican candidates, especially women, to distance themselves from Trump. This book explores how the Trump and Clinton campaigns used gender as a political weapon, and how the presidential race changed the ways in which House and Senate campaigns were waged in 2016 and 2018.

Conventional warfare-clashes between large military forces-defined twentieth-century power. But today, facing a dominant American military, principal adversaries Russia, China and Iran, have adopted a new style of competition. Cyber attacks, covert action, proxy conflicts, information and disinformation campaigns, espionage and economic coercion-these are the tools of irregular or asymmetric warfare, which will increasingly reshape international politics. In Three Dangerous Men, defence expert Seth G. Jones profiles pioneers of irregular warfare in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran who adapted American techniques and made huge gains without waging traditional warfare. Drawing on interviews with dozens of US military, diplomatic and intelligence officials, such as CIA directors Michael Hayden and David Petraeus, the author demonstrates why the US abandoned its own irregular capabilities and is thus steadily losing ground to its global adversaries. Jones argues the US must significantly alter how it thinks about-and engages in-competition before it is too late.