Political Communication In American Campaigns

""What makes this book unique is the basic structure: Descriptive or historical chapters, followed by discussions of strategies and tactics of political communication in numerous contexts.""

Now in its sixth edition, Political Campaign Communication provides a realistic understanding of the strategic and tactical communication choices candidates and their staffs must make as they wage an election campaign. Trent and Friedenberg's classic text has been updated throughout to reflect recent election campaigns, including 2004 and 2006 as well as the early stages of 2008. A new chapter focuses on the use of the Internet. Political Campaign Communication continues to be a classroom favorite and is thoroughly researched, insightful, and is a reader-friendly text.

Communication provides the basis of social cohesion, issue discussion, and legislative enactmentcore features of political activity and governing in the United States. Denton and Kuypers, experts in the field of political communication, synthesize materials and sources from political science, communication, history, journalism, and sociology to demonstrate how communication intersects with these fields to formulate political beliefs, attitudes, and values. Conventional categories of political activitycampaigns, activity in Congress, the courts, the mass media, and the presidencystructure the discussions. Theoretical and applied concepts drawn from firsthand sources and classic historical works, plus extensive use of contemporary examples, enrich understanding. Written in an engaging, accessible style that is geared to an undergraduate audience, the text ignites readers awareness that the essence of politics is talk or human interaction. Such interaction is formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal, public and privatebut always persuasive in nature, causing audiences to interpret, to evaluate, and to act.

Political Campaign Communication: Inside and Out examines the ins and outs of political campaigning through the eyes of both an academic and a political consultant. This text takes a unique approach to the subject of campaign communication by examining its intricacies from views both inside and outside of the process. Unlike many texts in this field, Political Campaign Communication: Inside and Out takes a broad view of political campaigning, discussing theories and principles, along with topics such as political socialization, the role of money, ethics, and critical events.

This volume examines political campaign communication around the concepts of theory, method and practice. It contains studies of political campaign communication using a wide range of empirical, rhetorical, and social science methodologies and reflects the growth and maturity of the discipline of political communication.

Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen examines how American political operatives use "personalized political communication" to engage with the electorate, and weighs the implications of ground war tactics for how we understand political campaigns and what it means to participate in them. He shows how ground wars are waged using resources well beyond those of a given candidate and their staff. These include allied interest groups and civic associations, party-provided technical infrastructures that utilize large databases with detailed individual-level information for targeting voters, and armies of dedicated volunteers and paid part-timers. Nielsen challenges the notion that political communication in America must be tightly scripted, controlled, and conducted by a select coterie of professionals. Yet he also quashes the romantic idea that canvassing is a purer form of grassroots politics. In today's political ground wars, Nielsen demonstrates, even the most ordinary-seeming volunteer knocking at your door is backed up by high-tech targeting technologies and party expertise. Ground Wars reveals how personalized political communication is profoundly influencing electoral outcomes and transforming American democracy.

Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns explores how social media influenced presidential campaign rhetoric. The author discusses media use in American presidential campaigns as well as social media campaigns for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. This book addresses how presidential candidates adapted their rhetorical performances for newspapers, radios, television, and the Internet. Scholars of rhetoric and political communication will find this book particularly useful.

In this political communication text, Richard M. Perloff examines the various ways in which messages are constructed and communicated from public officials and politicians through the mass media to the ultimate receivers-the people. With a focus on the history of political communication, he provides an overview of the most significant issues in the study of politics and the media. In addition to synthesizing facts and theories, and highlighting the scholarly contributions made to the understanding of political communication effects, Political Communication addresses such factors as the rhetorical accomplishments of American presidents, the ongoing tangles between the press and the presidency, and the historical roots of politics as it is practiced and studied today. It also addresses major issues about the press and politics that continually resurface, such as question of press bias and the use and manipulation of media by politicians to accomplish national goals. As a comprehensive and engaging introduction to contemporary political communication, this volume provides all readers with a historical perspective on American politics and press and offers a unique appreciation of the strengths and virtues of political communication in America.