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Explores the 25 most negative campaigns in American history, including key mayoral races, especially nasty gubernatorial contests, divisive runs for the U.S. Senate, and presidential mudslinging.
Swint (political science, Kennesaw State U.) provides a portrait of Roger Ailes, the formidable president of Fox News. The book, part media criticism and part history, follows Ailes from his first political campaign with Richard Nixon on 1968 to his ascension to the leadership of the Fox News Channel. This account of the conservative media mogul displays his tenacity, his style-over-substance approach, his ruthless, Machiavellian way of conducting business, and his imprint and influence on American politics and communications.
Voters often lack knowledge of government structure, political issues and candidates’ positions and frequently elect incompetent or venal politicians to office. Partisanship, corruption and inefficiency follow. Ideas for strengthening democracy are discussed, along with recommendations by various political scientists and philosophers.
One of the most closely-watched and controversial aspects of modern political campaigning is the use of negative, attack tactics. This book examines the role played by negative campaigning through a national survey of professional political consultants. Campaign consultants have become vitally important to political candidates in recent years as strategists, fundraisers, and media specialists. The research in this book focuses on how consultants define negative campaigning, including the differences between issue attacks and character attacks, how and when criticism of the opponent should be implemented, and which media should be used to deliver attack messages. A statistical analysis of the survey data reveals insights into behavioral and professional differences among consultants with regard to party affiliation, gender, age, and level of experience.
Poor Atlanta looks at the poor people’s campaigns in Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s, which operated in relationship to Sunbelt city- building efforts. With these efforts, city leaders aimed to prevent urban violence, staunch disinvestment, check white flight, and amplify Atlanta’s importance as a business and transportation hub. As urban leaders promoted Forward Atlanta, a program to, in Mayor Ivan Allen Jr.’s words, “sell the city like a product,” poor families insisted that their lives and living conditions, too, should improve. While not always operating within public awareness, antipoverty campaigns among the poor presented a regular and sometimes strident critique of inequality and Atlanta’s uneven urban development. With Poor Atlanta, LeeAnn B. Lands demonstrates that, while eclipsed by the Black freedom movement, antipoverty organizing (including direct action campaigns, legal actions, lobbying, and other forms of activism) occurred with regularity from 1964 through 1976. Her analysis is one of the few citywide studies of antipoverty organizing in late twentieth-century America.
During every election cycle, political observers generate a seemingly limitless supply of theories, opinions, and predictions. Unfortunately, many of these assertions oversimplify complex subjects or overhype the latest political fads. Inevitably, some misinformation becomes part of the conventional wisdom about American elections. The objective of Conventional Wisdom and American Elections: Exploding Myths, Exploring Misconceptions is to bring clarity to several of these subjects. For example, it is now commonplace for commentators to emphasize the negative tactics and practices of the campaigns of presidential candidates. In 2016, some commentators suggested that the presidential campaign ...
It Takes a Candidate serves as the first systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition Study, a national survey conducted on almost 3,800 'potential candidates', we find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elected office. Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to think they are 'qualified' to run for office. And they are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for office in the future. This gender gap in political ambition persists across generations. Despite cultural evolution and society's changing attitudes toward women in politics, running for public office remains a much less attractive and feasible endeavor for women than men.
In keeping with the state's major demographic upheavals of recent decades, Georgia politics is an interesting--and sometimes volatile--mix of tradition and change. In contrast to the state's rural past, most Georgians now live in cities or suburbs, and more than 40 percent of the population was born outside the state. However, religion and race remain issues that politicians ignore at great peril, and the state still fares poorly in measures of poverty, education, and voter turnout. Politics in Georgia uses a comparative framework to examine four major topics: the foundations of contemporary Georgia politics, political participation, major political institutions, and selected public policies...
Turn on the television or sign in to social media during election season and chances are you’ll see plenty of negative campaigning. For decades, conventional wisdom has held that Americans hate negativity in political advertising, and some have even argued that its pervasiveness in recent seasons has helped to drive down voter turnout. Arguing against this commonly held view, Kyle Mattes and David P. Redlawsk show not only that some negativity is accepted by voters as part of the political process, but that negative advertising is necessary to convey valuable information that would not otherwise be revealed. The most comprehensive treatment of negative campaigning to date, The Positive Cas...
It Still Takes A Candidate serves as the only systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study, a national survey conducted of almost 3,800 'potential candidates' in 2001 and a second survey of more than 2,000 of these same individuals in 2008, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elective office. Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office. And they are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for office in the future. This gender gap in political ambition persists across generations and over time.