Mediating The Vote

A sea change is taking place in how people use media, and it affects not only how people perceive political candidates and where they get their information, but also--more broadly--their basic democratic values. Mediating the Vote systematically explores a number of questions about media use and its relation to democratic engagement, analyzing the effects of communication forms on the 2004 presidential elections. Are Democratic and Republican voters increasingly turning to different outlets for information about candidates and campaigns and, if so, what does this mean for political discourse? Which communication forms--newspapers, television news programs, the Internet, or films--had the greatest impact on people's perceptions of the presidential candidates during the 2004 campaigns? Do different forms of media affect people, either intellectually or emotionally, in distinct ways? And do some communication forms elevate, whereas others degrade, basic democratic values? This book probes these questions and more, and the results contribute to an important goal in political communication studies: creating a more refined, integrated, and--ultimately--precise picture of how media affects democratic engagement.

To understand what drives the rift that divides our populace between liberal and conservative, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spent twenty-five years examining the moral foundations that undergird and inform two differing world views: the political left and right place different values of importance on order, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and liberty. From one of our keenest dissectors of moral systems, Why Do They Vote That Way? explains how deeply ingrained moral systems have estranged conservatives and liberals from one another while crossing the political divide in a search for understanding the miracle of human cooperation. A Vintage Shorts Selection. An ebook short.

Despite decades of women’s participation in politics, the gender identities of Canadian politicians continue to attract media and public attention and shape the way they are perceived and evaluated. Gendered Mediation takes an original approach to the study of gender and political communication by examining the implications of intersecting notions of gender, sexuality, race, age, and class deployed by politicians, journalists, and citizens in Canadian politics. Building upon the gendered mediation thesis, leading scholars argue that political communication and reporting still reinforces impressions of politics as a masculine domain. Their findings have profound implications for democracy not only in Canada but also for democratic political systems elsewhere.

This paper is one of a series being prepared for the National Research Council's Committee on International Conflict Resolution. The committee was organized in late 1995 to respond to a growing need for prevention, management, and resolution of violent conflict in the international arena, a concern about the changing nature and context of such conflict in the post-Cold War era, and a recent expansion of knowledge in the field. The committee's main goal is to advance the practice of conflict resolution by using the methods and critical attitude of science to examine the effectiveness of various techniques and concepts that have been advanced for preventing, managing, and resolving international conflicts. The committee's research agenda has been designed to supplement the work of other groups, particularly the Carnegie Corporation of New York's Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, which issued its final report in December 1997. The committee has identified a number of specific techniques and concepts of current interest to policy practitioners and has asked leading specialists on each one to carefully review and analyze available knowledge and to summarize what is known about the conditions under which each is or is not effective. These papers present the results of their work.