SubscribeBelow are books on political communication that I've encountered in the course of my research. I've placed these here to help hold down the signal to noise ratio in a rapidly expanding field. All reviews are written by myself, and should be taken as such, with no external approbation by any other party. I've posted quick ratings graphics for your information.
Rodgers- Contested Truths :|: Hariman - Political Style :|: Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!
Bimber & Davis - Campaigning Online :|: Edelman-Symbolic Uses of Politics
Davis - The Web of Politics :|: Gamson - Talking Politics
Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!
Authors: Tom DeLuca & John Buell
Title: Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics
Publication: NYU, 2005
Length: 225 pp.
ISBN: 0-8147-1975-9
The central claim of Liars! is that the demonization laced throughout political controversies consists of interrelated themes and assumptions concerning the nature of the relationship between personal and political life as well as character and service. The most profound and dangerous commentary to emerge from recent campaigns, say Buell and DeLuca, is the implication that there is a determinate relationship between personal character as registered through private actions and beliefs, and the moral quality of one’s agenda. In short, the escalating rhetoric of demonization weakens our ability to deliberate. It appears in many forms; however, there is always one constant in political demonization: it relies on the imputation of moral or spiritual failure, deviance, or extremism, and it will always have a characterological component.
In this, the book is indebted to the work of Murray Edelman, whose identification of the "other" as a unifying device reshaped political scholarship. Demonization is a common tendency in political rhetoric for all of us, and its surface consequences, the reinforcement of ideological polarization and racial tension, are dire enough. They provide a fascinating deconstruction of civil rights politics from this point of view. Criticizing modern practitioners of identity politics (some of the best demonizers and targets for demonization available), they note that "The civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, unlike groups pressing for some of the targeted interventions of more recent times, employed a paradigm of rights in their broadest sense" (172). In other words, it aimed to make the American myth live up to its name and grant universal rights of citizenship. Rights, they claim, are distinct from policies and interests in that they codify fundamental and universally applicable principles: "their contours are contestable, but that contest is constrained by the parameters of [that which is codified]."
Exorbitant use of rights claims, they note, is reciprocally related to the pattern of demonization. Rights have become commodities, with discourse growing more vitriolic as conflicts of interest become conflated into denials of rights. They state that when rights claims are inflated, three consequences occur: first, rights claims cannot carry the moral weight placed upon them, and appropriate assertions of rights are weakened. Second, when rights are commodified, when the claim is inflated for a finite resource, material or otherwise, "rights discourse especially loses its essential universal aspect. It becomes a zero sum game, a competition over "rights" as though they were opportunities, goods, or services." Finally, civic virtue erodes, and the coalitions necessary for group empowerment become impossible to achieve: "a balkanization of political spirit sets in, which divides constituencies, further depletes legitimacy from the idea of active, democratic governance, and adds to the decline of civic life" (173).
Worse for our democracy than the polarization outlined above - the surface effect of demonization - they claim, is that the focus on character that is reinforced through demonization serves to disempower the public by distracting it from the structural sources of problems: when one group is replaced, a docile public expects things to improve without structural input, then becomes receptive to a new round of demonization based on the character of the new failed leader. Such a process leads to simplistic theories of political change, as if by toppling one leader, noxious policies and exclusions will stop immediately: modes of analysis that focus on the evils of one leader distract us from understanding the systemic pressures that constrict the parameters of a policy agenda.
In addition to being an incredibly useful book for political communication scholars, this book is also an excellent, quick read, with a number of fascinating examples and anecdotes drawn from contemporary politics.
- Reviewed Apr. 2009
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Political Style: The Artistry of Power
Author: Robert Hariman
Title: Political Style: The Artistry of Power
Publication: The University of Chicago, 1995
Length: 258 pp.
ISBN: 0-226-31630-0
Hariman's Political Style finds several common threads in his historiorhetorical discussion of archetypal political philosophers, from Machiavelli and Cicero to Kafka, especially in the common need throughout to address the classical question of political decorum: How does one speak to those of a higher station while still advancing one's goals? Each member of the hierarchy is embedded within a web of stylistic rules dependent upon observation and interaction (p. 76), with certain key figures becoming a text in themselves and others fading over time. This is the central theme of the book, explored through realist (Machiavelli), courtly (Kapusinski), republican (Cicero), and bureaucratic (Kafka) approaches to politics. As he dissects these texts, he interweaves his findings with examples from the present.
Hariman notes that in each of these approaches, a clear matrix between institution, actor, and public develops that, in all cases, places style at the center as both a "stable and comprehensive pattern of motivation embedded in specific social practices and as a dynamic process that is inherently unstable and unsettling because it generates at the intersection of poetics and politics" (p. 179). Within that matrix, it is the symbolic institutions, embodied as men or functional groups, that become the locus of political power. Over time, these institutions become so embedded within a culture that their names become dual referents, to both the mythical, symbolic structure as well as to its current embodiment.
Power structures are not the sole focus of style and power: the individual political actor is the driving force behind all institutional developments, especially in a republican approach. Indeed, as Hariman tells us, the republican style is unique in that it is the sole form in which political activity is conflated with public address. To the republican mind, persuasive power is the equivalent of political acuity, and symbols are necessary tools. In a republican political system, speeches invent the public character, their pageantry the public. The republic, constituted in discourse, relies upon persistent attention to ethos and audience, intensely fragile and reliant upon continued attention. Thus, as Hariman notes, the Republican orator has a great fondness for "symbolic foundings, dramatic acts that transform a preconstitutive state into a republic" (p. 121).
Valuable - definitely a worthwhile addition to any rhetorical scholar's library, especially given his interweaving of classical rhetoricians throughout the ages with modern political figures.
- Reviewed Mar. 2009
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Contested Truths
Author: Daniel T. Rodgers
Title: Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence
Publication: Harvard UP, 1987
Length: 278 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-674-16711-7
Daniel Rodgers opens his 1987 book, Contested Truths, with the idea of utility and what he believes is the odd disavowal of the concept in the birth of American politics: to Rodgers, it appears inconceivable that a nation conceived during the Enlightenment by economic utilitarians was so opposed to the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, he notes, considered himself "an American in spirit" (19), and was himself shocked that, although observers of English politics felt that Bentham's work was ubiquitous in political life at the end of the eighteenth century, early political thinkers in the American republic buried Benthamite utilitarianism under "a mountain of excoriation" (19). Rodgers appears to blame this lack of embrace upon the nature of Utility to demolish metaphor and abstraction, and seems puzzled that as "hard as nineteenth-century lawyers worked to shovel instrumental reasons into law . . . they were enormously reluctant to admit, even among themselves, that they were doing anything of the sort" (34).
Although Rodgers dances around the subject, he never quite approaches what I feel to be the primary reason that American lawmakers failed to fully embrace utilitarianism until well into the twentieth century (and then under the pragmatic auspices of William James): the need for a new nation to create an identity. Such an identity cannot be crafted without metaphor: the flexibility of metaphor allowed early thinkers in the United States to debate and craft the principles and ideals - which are necessarily ambiguous - that formed our national character, our myth. Those who realize that they are creating history - something of which we are told that Washington was acutely conscious - realize that they are generating something different, and that their creation will be distinct only through their work. Those who were politically active in the early days of the republic were too close to the idea of nation building, too close to the history that they were creating - the identity they were crafting - to be able to separate themselves from that identity: they would leave it to future generations to distill the principles they designed into the system.
Despite his incomplete treatment of Utility, Rodgers's book does cover some very important ground for understanding and framing key political concepts as they arise and develop. From "Utility," he moves on to the idea of "Natural Rights," a concept that, initially at least, was far from the minds of the colonists whose opinions concerning the state of personhood and individuality had been shaped by centuries of common law submission to the will of a single individual (47-8). Even "natural," as he notes, was "hardly more than a fashionably resonant term of emphasis" (49), during the eighteenth century: to insist on the natural rights of colonists was simply an emphasized request to recognize the colonists as full citizens of the Empire, not to recognize them as independent individuals within a state.
Further ideas, such as "The People," "Government" (directly related to our understanding of the people as owners/subjects/participants therein), and "Interests" are fascinating, but ultimately revisits the same conceptual ground and serves mainly to provide a theoretical framework in which we can understand the rise and use of important concepts in political language. "Of the making of words," states Rodgers, "there is no end. Since independence the keywords of political talk had risen and receded in crises and cycles" (212). Over time, such words bear the strain of overuse, occasionally fall to the wayside, and are taken up again with renewed fervor when events warrant: the post-Nixonian revival of "privacy" might be a notable occurrence of such.
This book is interesting, useful to some limited degree, but has definitely been surpassed by newer volumes addressing the topic, especially those by Roderick Hart and his colleagues. It might be more useful to historians looking at rhetoric.
- Reviewed Feb. 2009
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Campaigning Online: The Internet in US Elections
Authors: Bruce A. Bimber, Richard Davis
Title: Campaigning Online: The Internet in US Elections
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003
Length: 240 pp.
ISBN: 0-195-15156-9
One of the major arguments of this book is that during the 2000 election, the internet became a major component - instead of an afterthought - in recruiting and establishing volunteers and in distributing communication. In short, Bimber & Davis posit that information technology is directly responsible for a higher level of political engagement.
The book presents a systematic analysis of scientifically collected data about the role of the Internet in elections: who visits campaign websites and how their online experiences affected them. The value of their conclusions is their proof of many commonplace assumptions about voter behavior and the effects of the web thereon, assumptions that, until the publication of this book, had not yet been tested to such an extent. One of the most important conclusions is the value they place on the growth in interactivity - both real and perceived - and its many uses.
They attribute this growth in interactivity to something they label "narrowcasting," roughly understood as "information that flows in multiple directions, broader but at the same time more purposeful." Their contention is that when participating via website, especially in navigating, voters saw the product of their choices as revealed by their intentional actions of typing or clicking. They saw themselves as active participants and as informed citizens, who, rather than learn from 30 second sound bites and commercials that interrupted programming in the evening, were seeking positions and policies. This transparency, they note, is far greater than in mass media, and may lead candidates to hold more consistent positions, which some campaign managers may not see as desirable.
This book is an interesting, well-researched and balanced take on the role of the internet in US elections in this decade. I feel that in a few years, it will be less relevant, and in fact may be on the cusp of this right now, but only because as the web evolves, so do our political uses thereof.
- Reviewed Nov. 2008
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The Symbolic Uses of Politics
Author: Murray Edelman
Title: The Symbolic Uses of Politics
Publisher: The University of Illinois Press, 1964, 1985
Length: 220 pages
ISBN: 978-0-252-01202-0
This slim volume has been one of the most important books in the field of political science and political communication for over forty years. It is accessible to undergraduates, yet extremely valuable to the experienced scholar, displaying a critical gaze of political practices and ideas that seems to stand the test of time. The tenth printing, in 1985, included a new afterword by Edelman that re-examined the critical themes of the book and revealed again their relevance for the contemporary American. The language is clear, concise, and unequivocal, unique in itself among the jargonistic social sciences, almost unheard of in contemporary scholarship.
The book addresses symbolic forms that are crucial in understanding our political institutions, symbolic forms that are commonly associated with primitive tribes, that are surprisingly accurate when addressing a so-called modern society. As Edelman tells us, "To study the working of ritual and myth in this area is to examine persisting political institutions, in contrast to the passing parade of news. For rite and myth are persistent, in precisely the same sense and for the same reasons that elections, discussions of politics, patriotic holiday ceremonies, legislative postures, judicial dramas of combat, and administrative busyness are persistent" (p. 16).
This book is very much worth it. It is definitely a necessary addition to the library of any political science or communication scholar.
- Reviewed 1 Jun. 2008
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The Web of Politics
Author: Richard Davis
Title: The Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on The American Political System
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999
Length: 224 pages
ISBN: 0-19-511485-X
The most admirable trait of Davis's book, one of the first scholarly treatments of the effects of the Internet on American politics (I loathe the popular use of "impact" when the meaning is "effect"), is its skepticism during a period in which everyone was enthusiastically engaging in ecstatic technoevangelism about the "freedom" that was an "inherent trait" in the Internet. Tech stocks were soaring, just about to crash, when Davis took a good look at how the electronic sphere was truly developing, and in answer to cyberlibertarian beliefs, stated emphatically that the web was not causing a democratic, populist political revolution, that the predicted transition to an Athenian-style, every man for himself antithesis - of - Jeffersonian - Republicanism would never happen, at least not through the auspices of the political arm of the Internet. While he was writing, despite popular perceptions to the contrary, the web favored stagnant content: there was no interactivity on web sites, people received information with little chance to respond. People seeking news were likely to type "oldmediaoutlet'sname.com" into the URL, thus reinforcing the power of old media.
Unfortunately, the benefits of this book in 2008 are largely as a historical document. Most of the interactivity that was predicted wasn't apparent until after the 2000 election, when the political blogosphere got up and running. Indeed, only recently did it reach a large enough number of people to be considered an effective opinion device, and even more recently, an outlet for true deliberation. Davis makes safe assumptions that technology would continue to develop in the direction it had, that is, proprietary, noninteractive content that visitors would receive without a chance to rebut. His sampling of electronic documents includes outdated (now almost a non-factor) outlets such as USENET. In all, I really couldn't, in good conscience, recommend this to anyone other than graduate students or faculty interested in historic observations of the political internet, which is nearly unrecognizable in comparison to the stagnant content of the 1996 websites at the heart of Davis's sampling.
This book is worth a read; however, not as much more than a historical document. I wouldn't say that it's a necessary addition to anyone's collection.
- Reviewed 1 Feb. 2008
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Talking Politics
Author: William Gamson
Title: Talking Politics
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Length: 272 pp.
ISBN: 0-521-43679-6
Despite its relative age, this book is an essential addition to anyone interested in studying political communication, rhetoric, or sociology. Gamson examines the relationship between the media, the citizens, politicians, and the possibilities of collective action. The central theses of Talking Politics are that people are neither as passive, nor as stupid, as social science portraits portray them, and furthermore, that people negotiate media messages in complex, varying ways that depend upon not only situational context but also cultural and interpersonal interaction. Political conversation, states Gamson, is informed and shaped by an implicit "frame" or organizational idea, and his book's focus draws upon these frames in order to examine the particular kinds of political consciousness that support mobilization for collective action, or "collective action frames." He names three components for a collective action frame and examines them in the order in which they must appear in order for the frame to coalesce.
First, there must be a sense of injustice, or moral indignation, and that in order to establish a sense of injustice, activists must instill a sense that the injustice is personal: see, for example, the rapid rise in contributions to food banks following the Pulitzer-Prize winning photograph of a vulture waiting to feed on a collapsed, starving girl. It is interesting — and very American — that in order to form a "collective," the appeal must be individualized. Secondly, there must be a sense of agency, or some sense of collective efficacy that denies the possibility that things cannot change. Finally, the collective must establish a common sense of group identity, a definition of the "we" who oppose "them" — in short, there must be an adversarial component, or else the sense of injustice will evaporate. The injustice component is the catalyst that facilitates the adoption of the other elements, promoting agency and identity.
All of the above appears within the first chapter. The rest of the book is equally as informative, providing analyses of approaches that work to maintain or suppress a collective action frame, adversary, and follow relevant counterthemes that increase the size of the possible group. He also provides an interesting analysis of how various movements succeeded, where their difficulties lay, and lessons that we can take from them.
Highly recommended to anyone involved in political communication or activism. The American media could take some interesting notions from this book, as could potential grassroots activists.
- Reviewed 1 Feb. 2008
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