The feature of our first issue of the year showcases three upcoming events sponsored by our divisions and organized by members. These events present outstanding opportunities for researchers to engage with current political communication scholarship. The organizers of our two polcomm preconferences at this year’s ICA present reasons for why and how the themes of their preconferences are relevant to political communication research. They also preview their conference programs.

Beyond the ICA preconferences, we provide information about an exciting opportunity for young researchers in political communication to engage with some of the most eminent scholars in our field: the Summer School in Political Communication, also co-sponsored by our division. The contributions highlight some of the great work by our division members to create communication spaces for scholars to engage with some of the most pressing questions in our field today. We hope they will pique your interest and make you consider attending one or more of these events yourself!

1. David Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, Matthew Powers, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, organizers of an ICA preconference onQualitative Political Communication Research, discuss the background, timeliness, and relevance of qualitative approaches in political communication.

2. Christian Baden, Wouter van Atteveldt, and Jana Diesner, organizers of an ICA preconference on Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research, discuss how these two advanced techniques apply to and promise great advances in political communication scholarship.

3. Gianpietro Mazzoleni introduces one of the most important initiatives for junior scholars in political communication, the International Summer School in Political Communication and Electoral Behaviour. The theme of the School this year is “(New) Media Effects on Electoral Behaviour,” and young researchers intrerested in taking part are very much encouraged to submit their research proposals — the deadline for submissions has been extended to April 19, 2014!

What is the Role of Qualitative Research in Political Communication?

ICA Preconference on Qualitative Political Communication Research (Seattle, WA, May 22, 2014)

David Karpf, George Washington University

Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Matthew Powers, University of Washington

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford and Roskilde University

Political communication research has a rich, methodologically and theoretically diverse history. Consider Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Scholars today may remember Lazarsfeld primarily for his pioneering contributions to survey research. However, a close reading of his work reveals that Lazarsfeld not only recognized the value of qualitative research. True to his roots in sociology, he practiced it, and actively argued for it. Indeed, Lazarsfeld’s ground-breaking idea of personal influence in political communication emerged through the in-depth interviews and field observations that he and his associates conducted in Eerie County, Ohio (1940, published as “The People’s Choice”), Decatur, Illinois (1945, published as “Personal Influence”), and Elmira, New York (1948, published as “Voting”).

Our main journal, Political Communication, and our most important professional forum, the APSA and ICA Political Communication Division (PCD), are in principle committed to continuing and furthering this mixed methods tradition. But in practice the field has taken a quantitative turn since the 1970s. Methods and theories associated with behavioralist currents within political science and social psychology have come to define the center of the field and what is considered legitimate research. As quantitative methods came to dominate the center of the field, qualitative research has become more marginal, especially in the United States.

For example, in an analysis of the Political Communication journal over the past ten years (forthcoming in the 2013 ICA Theme Book), we found that only 20% of published articles involve some sort of qualitative research (defined broadly to encompass interpretative, field, historical, critical, and rhetorical analyses.)  Even more striking, only 9.6% of articles are based on what we consider empirical field research – interviews and field observations of the kind Lazarsfeld and his colleagues engaged in.

While some individual pieces of qualitative scholarship are very influential, much of the field seems to be moving in a different direction, even as qualitative methods remain central to adjacent fields with overlapping objects of analysis, such as sociology, journalism studies, and audience research. Even more striking, qualitative methods – such as focus groups, in-depth interviewing, and qualitative panel studies – are central to the work of political practitioners.  Indeed, the 2012 Obama campaign’s Director of Opinion Research David Simas made the point (personal communication) that not only did the campaign conduct more quantitative research than any campaign in history; it also conducted more qualitative research than any campaign in history.

What might qualitative research contribute to the field in the future? We hope to find out at the ICA pre-conference on qualitative research in political communication in May, co-sponsored by the PCD. In organizing this preconference, we were inspired by the challenge posed in W. Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar’s 2008 critique of the state of the field and their call for researchers to improve their understanding of political communication processes in rapidly changing social and technological contexts. We believe that part of the stasis in the field that Bennett and Iyengar identify relates to the overly narrow reliance on quantitative methodological approaches such as surveys and experiments. We believe that scholars need to supplement these methods with approaches that bring us closer to the actual social and technological contexts of political life and help us understand how political communication processes are experienced by citizens, practitioners, candidates, and journalists. Therefore, the preconference focuses on how qualitative research, especially field methods, can advance theory-building and provide sophisticated analytical and empirical understandings of the changing contexts of political communication, from the shifting forms of journalism and campaigns to the new platforms and contexts where citizens gather and engage in political life.

The pre-conference features 33 original research papers and methodological articles from 11 countries, and is organized by David Karpf (George Washington University), Daniel Kreiss (UNC-Chapel Hill), Matthew Powers(University of Washington), and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (University of Oxford and Roskilde University). The works presented discuss the role of qualitative methods in political communication research, their relation to other methods and theories, and present studies that rely on qualitative methods. The pre-conference will also feature a number of prominent scholars, including Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (USC), W. Lance Bennett (University of Washington), Leah Lievrouw (UCLA), Silvio Waisbord (GWU), Michael X. Delli Carpini (University of Pennsylvania), and Michael Schudson (Columbia University), who will discuss the role of qualitative research in theories and research on political communication.

As conference organizers, we have also set up a blog publishing previews of the papers accepted for presentation at the pre-conference, interviews with authors of books and articles relevant to the discussion, and short essays on methodological issues, research observations, and classics re-read for their relevance today. (Scholars interested in contributing to the blog should contact one of the organizers.)

We hope the pre-conference will help advance our understanding of the role of qualitative research in political communication research and help foster a community of scholars keen to develop the analytical and theoretical potential of empirical methods that, pursued alone and in combination with quantitative methods, helped our field during an earlier period of upheaval in media and politics—and may do so again.

Conference website: http://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/ica-pre-conference/

Reconnecting Theory and Methodology in the “Network Tradition”

ICA Preconference on Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research (Seattle, WA, May 22, 2014)

Christian Baden, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich

Wouter van Atteveldt, Free University Amsterdam

Jana Diesner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

At last year’s ICA Conference in London, a packed plenary testified to the timeliness of what Elihu Katz, Ronald E. Rice, Richard Rogers and Noshir Contractor described as the “network tradition” in communication research. Not only do numerous theories in communications imply networked behavior and influences, but also many other theories can or must be reconceptualized in a networked manner. Opinion leaders and information diffusion, opinion climates and campaign communication, news construction and framing can be understood as networked practices and patterns in political communication. Also the rise of social media, which are networked in their very structure, has given further momentum to a network perspective in communication research.

Nevertheless, the impressive and fast advances in network analytic methodology often remain somewhat disconnected from the aforementioned theoretical questions and concerns. Applications of network methodology remain too often driven by data and powerful algorithms; at the same time, theory-driven research often makes only limited use of the rich methodological toolbox of network analysis. Important potentials of communication theory for directing the development of network methodology, and of network perspectives for informing current research, remain to be actualized: Given the flattening of hierarchies and the collaborative definition of fluid interaction patterns in communication (e.g., in social media, governance networks, social movements), network views can complement old sender-focused and gatekeeper-dominated research perspectives; they can add differentiation to person-centered or aggregative research into audience behavior or interpersonal communication, and redefine the view upon social context and patterns of social interaction. Also in research into media contents, networked perspectives enable a nuanced view upon linked or competing claims, frames, and other contents; advances in semantic network analysis, specifically, can inform the study of evolving discourse and dynamic debates, and even reflect the participatory, interactive structure of content production and negotiation in public communication.

This preconference contributes to reconnecting theory and methodology in the “network tradition” in communication research: Its papers advance and apply cutting edge network analytic strategies to advance research on established research questions of theoretical concern to the field, and they rephrase important theoretical questions to make full use of the powerful potentials of network methodology. The preconference features a rich mix of papers ranging from the networked theoretical modeling of social influence to the development of new, network-based measures for gauging frame evolution. The program furthermore comprises presentations of current tools developed to render network analysis in communication more user-friendly and flexible in application.

The program comprises four sessions, organized into two main blocks. The two morning sessions, which deal with “Networks and Persuasion” and “Networked communication dynamics”, focus on the nexus of content and interaction in the analysis of socio-semantic networks. In the first session, Leo Kim considers participatory practices in stem cell research; Robert Bond et al. present a massive experiment into social influence on social media, and Nick Beauchamp unfolds a model of argumentative persuasion in networked online communication. In the second session, James Danowski predicts mobile communication network evolution from semantic network data, and Se Jung Park et al. investigate interaction and content multiplication patterns on twitter. In addition, Jana Diesner as well as Kasper Welbers and Wouter van Atteveldt present novel software tools for the analysis of semantic and socio-semantic networks.

In the afternoon, two sessions on “Interactive News Networks” and “Measuring Network Evolution” primarily address the constructive and diachronic processes that characterize semantic news networks. The third session comprises one study by Jelle Boumans et al. on the production of news from the interaction of sources, journalists; an analysis of frame alignment between PR material, media contents, and public beliefs by Toni van der Meer et al.; and an assessment of country-specific variations in news framing of the financial crisis by Jan Kleinnijenhuis et al. In the last session, Christian Baden and Giovanni Motta present a comparative extension to their Evolutionary Factor Analysis framework that serves to compare dynamic discourse processes; Jakob-Moritz Eberl et al. discuss the measurement and role of higher or lower complexity presentations in the news, and George Barnett uses international terrorism coverage to demonstrate the power of a novel strategy for gauging coherence and co-movement between news debates. The program concludes with a roundtable discussion on the state and future directions of network methodology and theory in communication research.

Taken together, the contributions to the preconference raise theoretical, operational, measurement and analytic questions, and offer ample room for discussion. The contributors comprise researchers experienced in different aspects of networked communication research, bringing in perspectives from political science, sociology, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and information technology. The diversity of international participants, and the mix of young and experienced scholars promises an innovative and rich debate.

Conference website: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesner/calls/ICA2014_socsem_preconf.html

Hello and welcome to The Political Communication Report, the newsletter for the Political Communication Divisions of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the International Communication Association (ICA)!

Editor’s note: This is the first issue of my three-year term as newsletter editor and the start of my work as a webmaster for our divisions. I want to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to Talia Stroud for helping me transition smoothly into PCR’s editorship. I look forward to working with the members and leadership of the divisions. The overarching objective will be to maintain and develop PCR as a unique communication space for our division members and anyone interested in political communication research. This task will involve a major overhaul and relaunch of the site, which we hope will be realized later this year. So stay tuned! If in the meantime you have an idea for PCR’s development or a contribution, please let me know!

In this edition of PCR, please find:

(a) Feature: Previewing the PolComm ICA Preconferences and Summer School

The annual ICA conference is just around the corner (see Announcements section)! It will feature not only an outstanding collection of currentpolitical communication research but also two preconferences organized by members and sponsored by our  division. Preconferences provide opportunities to devote a full-day program of presentations to questions worked on at the frontiers of our field. Here the organizers of this year’s preconferences discuss the importance of their themes for polcomm researchers and preview the programs for Seattle.

We also introduce another great offering of our division, the International Summer School in Political Communication and Electoral Behaviour, once again held this year in Milan, Italy.

(b) Announcements with particular relevance to the field and our divisions, including several calls for applications.

If you have not already done so, please also join our divisions on Facebook to receive the most up-to-date information on job postings, calls for papers, etc.!

A big thank you to the contributors to this newsletter! Please send me any feedback and suggestions you might have on this issue or possible improvements to PCR.

Wishing you a great start of spring and looking forward to meeting you in Seattle,

Eike Mark Rinke
Research Associate, University of Mannheim

Richard Stanton
Department of Media and Communications
University of Sydney

Political communication has a bright, expanding future. In the Asia Pacific region political communication research is undertaken to enhance private political activity. It includes news polling, political party opinion polling and government intervention campaign research. It is applied and theoretical. Political practitioners such as politicians, reporters and journalists use applied research to develop communication strategies while surveys and polling are the preferred tactics (Stanton 2014).

A simple evaluation of the level of brightness of the future for political communication could be measured by the number of graduate courses that surface each year particularly in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom. The Asia Pacific region, excluding the USA, has been less enthusiastic but the historical lag in educational offerings followed by an accelerated boom means Asia will in the next few years account for a dramatic increase in academic political communications. It will be adapted and developed in non-democratic countries such as China and Vietnam.

The problem for political communication lies in the capacity of course developers to think beyond the tradition of political science. To be valorised in sociopolitical and corporate senses political communication must demonstrate a serious balance between traditional quantitative political science and more radical qualitative social science.

For me this has led to some experiments with emerging resources. I am interested in how vectors play out at the conjunction of teaching and practice. Teaching and practice in the political communication sphere can develop or adapt independently a variety of tools from other fields. So-called social media play an important role; Facebook is used as a tactic in the development of a political campaign strategies for example. Politicians and candidates post images to Pinterest, create blogspots, and establish large email databases in their quest to become netroots savvy and competitive (for more on netroots campaigning see Kerbel, 2008).

In 2011 I ran as an independent candidate in the state election in New South Wales, Australia. Campaign activity was proscribed by limited financial and human resources. The campaign evolved substantially around attempts to attract media attention for the various issues I thought were important. I also theorised about the campaign value of the microblog Twitter. Time constraints meant it remained theoretical.

Since the conclusion of the campaign I have experimented with Twitter as a teaching and campaign resource. I had been very interested in the microblog as a form of conversation – a resource for sharing globally and overcoming time zone differences – where a facilitator presents while anyone and everyone engages in the conversation by following a specific Twitter tag. In the communication world the value of #journchat or #prchat are evident. What was less evident was the value of commercial engagement. One that stood out for me was #agchat out of the United States and its ‘downunder’ offshoot #agchatoz. Both of these conversations are outreach mechanisms for regional, rural and urban stakeholders (it is a simple step to move from being a stakeseeker to a stakeholder in this sense) with an unprecedented opportunity to engage. The conversations offer layers of engagement from observation to deep technical participation. I saw this as a step towards taking the Twitter tag into the classroom and creating a lecture or series of lectures around a topic. In 2012 I announced to an undergraduate class that a one hour traditional lecture would be replaced with a ‘twecture’ – a lecture presented on Twitter. The objective was to restate a series of set pieces of information as a sequence of questions. Undergraduates were not expected to answer the questions, external experts were invited to participate in the conversation. I anticipated that students would act as they had in a traditional lecture, as observers, but they were free to do so from anywhere; they did not need to attend the classroom. The twecture was advertised in advance on Twitter (retweeted and favorited), on Linkedin (for its more serious business-to-business connectivity), and by email lists. The reaction from different stakeholders was mixed. Those students who had Twitter accounts apprehended and applauded. Those who were not Twitter stakeholders needed to be instructed in elementary Twitter culture. The biggest hurdle for undergraduates lay in the dynamic of the 140 character Tweet. They found it difficult to grasp the flow of the conversation. They attempted to inject irony. They failed. They looked for a single point of focus – a lecturer at the front of the class. They were affronted by being taken out of their comfortable classroom environment. They did not grasp the significance of the contribution made by global experts. Professionals who opted in, however, provided positive feedback. They were keen to inject their expertise into a university classroom. Some where keen to provide input based on their experiences since leaving university themselves. Some provided long-term perspectives.

More recently I took the twecture format to a different level. A regular Monday two-hour graduate seminar, repeated three times during the day and evening, fell on a public holiday. It was replaced by a one and a half hour Twitter conversation under the tag #polcomOz . The tag was created for the purpose of providing feedback and quantitative measurement: how many students opted in; how many external invited experts provided commentary and how many times they tweeted; how many tweeps with no specific connection to the topic tweeted (stakeseekers?) (the results are available by logging on to the tag). Traditional seminars included topic notes which were provided to students in the week before each seminar. In the twecture questions were framed against the notes for the week on linked topics: campaign evaluation and presentation of results to a client.

While the number of participants was not large the quality of the conversation was very good. Questions ranged around campaign capabilities, candidate image, campaign evaluation and presentation. Some participants provided experiential analysis of campaigns and candidates with whom they had worked at the recent Australian general election. Comments and answers were generally pragmatic – if a campaign or a candidate fails it is important to explain in detail how they could improve their next performance. Participants saw it as their job to keep candidates firmly within ethical campaign guidelines and to demonstrate their qualifications for public office through leadership, effective engagement and well-framed policies. I will analyse the tag in detail in the next few months.

Twitter, like Facebook, Pinterest and Youtube is a fine pedagogical resource.

Works Cited

Stanton R 2014 in Mazzoleni G (Ed) Political Communication Research in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, the International Encyclopaedia of Political Communication, London Wiley.

Kerbel M 2009 Netroots: Online progressives and the transformation of American politics, New York Paradigm.

Catie Snow Bailard
School of Media and Public Affairs
George Washington University

The effect of Internet use on citizens’ evaluations and satisfaction regarding their governments’ performance is an important yet still understudied component of the Internet’s potential to motivate political activity and organization. The Internet’s capacity to uniquely affect evaluations is a result of the degree to which the Internet has reshaped contemporary information landscapes – altering the quantity and range of available information as well as the criteria through which individuals evaluate their governments. This is a significant component of the potential for Internet use to prompt political activity and organization; since, it is these evaluations that can and will, at times, encourage men and women to act and organize politically.

By triangulating across methodological strengths and weaknesses, combining statistical analyses of large-N data sets with field experiments offers a robust empirical foundation for understanding the nature of the Internet’s effects on evaluations and democratic attitudes. While laboratory experiments contributed to many of the greatest advances in political communication research since the field’s renaissance began in the 1970s – particularly in tests of agenda-setting, framing, priming, and campaign negativity – field experiments remain a very under-utilized method in this discipline. This is likely for very pragmatic reasons: field experiments are both difficult and costly to execute well. However, by enabling a direct causal test of the Internet’s effects, field experiments address a troubling gap in the present literature, in which actual causal tests remain rare. Additionally, by conducting the experiment in the field – on actual citizens recruited from the community at large, who are using the Internet as they would organically – it is possible to also augment the external validity of this test (at least relative to laboratory experiments).

Within this vein, in an analysis of the effect of Internet use on democratic satisfaction and related political evaluations, I combined large-N quantitative analyses of survey data at both the individual- and country-levels (spanning 45 and 73 countries, respectively) with randomized field experiments in Tanzania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The findings uncovered in each of the analyses of survey data, as well as in the experiments, substantiate the Internet’s clear, consistent, and considerable influence on democratic satisfaction. Whereas the Internet is correlated with enhanced satisfaction in advanced democracies, Internet use depresses satisfaction and evaluations in nations with weak democratic practices (Bailard, 2012a; Bailard, 2012b; Bailard, in press).

The results of the field experiments also substantiate the Internet’s capacity to influence a broader range of meaningful political evaluations, including diminished trust in government and more skeptical evaluations of the integrity of a contested election. However, these results also reveal that one democratic gain, such as more critical evaluations of poor-performing governments, does not automatically set off a chain of entirely pro-democratic gains in citizens’ attitudes and behaviors. In the case of this analysis, for example, the experiment in Bosnia and Herzegovina revealed that individuals who became more skeptical of and dissatisfied with the quality of democratic practices in their country, also became more likely to consider alternative forms of government as preferable for their country. In Tanzania, voters who became more critical of the integrity of their contested presidential election were also less likely to vote. This suggests that the influence of Internet use on evaluations and, subsequently, behavior is a complex, contextually-dependent process that in some instances will prove a double-edged sword for democracy and democratization.

The diffusion of information and communication technologies rapidly throughout the globe – often into regions that were previously nearly devoid of such capabilities – means that opportunities abound to explore how these technologies interact with and influence political attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes. Moreover, multiple-method analyses that favor a cross-national approach to testing for these effects will enable researchers to construct a more robust theoretical understanding of the nature of Internet’s effect on political evaluations. This includes seeking out and testing the contextual factors that likely condition the Internet’s effect across a broad range of political evaluations, as well as the factors that predict when the Internet’s influence on political evaluations will tend to be largely pro-democratic in nature and those instances in which the effect of Internet use will prove more of a mixed bag. Finally, identifying and testing the contextual factors that condition the effect of Internet use on satisfaction and political evaluations will also lay the groundwork for generating more reliable predictions of when and where these evaluations will make political activity and organization both more and less likely to occur.

Works Cited

Bailard, C. S. (2012a). A Field Experiment on the Internet’s Effect in an African Election: Savvier Citizens, Disaffected Voters, or Both?. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 330-344.

Bailard, C. S. (2012b). Testing the Internet’s Effect on Democratic Satisfaction: A Multi-Methodological, Cross-National Approach. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(2), 185-204.

Bailard, C.S. (in press). As Seen Online (Satisfaction not Guaranteed): How Internet Use Changes Citizens’ Evaluations of their Government. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kevin Arceneaux
Department of Political Science
Temple University

Martin Johnson
Department of Political Science
University of California, Riverside

The proliferation of television channels during the last 30 years and the expanded opportunity to choose among types of news and entertainment programming affects the influence of news media, especially partisan news channels. In our recent book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice, we find that when viewers can choose what they watch, it dampens the influence of partisan news on a variety of judgments for at least two reasons. First, a diverse array of options reduces the size of the news audience. Second, the people who want to watch partisan news are different from people who prefer not to watch it. Members of the audience for partisan news have stronger political views and predispositions than members of the audience for entertainment programs. Those who are the most likely to be swayed by partisan news are also most likely to avoid it.

Our findings lend further support to normative concerns that media fragmentation offers a far greater harm than political polarization: Disengagement. While many worry about the viewers of MSNBC and Fox News representing wholly different political worldviews rendering a common political conversation impossible, quietly a disconcertingly large number of viewers are dropping out of the conversation entirely. At any time of the day or night a viewer could theoretically watch the news, but so many are choosing Duck Dynasty instead.

We also show that, in spite of the best intentions of political observers who prescribe it, asking partisans to view political messages from the other side will do very little to reduce political polarization. In fact, forcing people to watch counter-attitudinal news hardens their political views. Encouraging people to “hear the other side” in operation actually further entrenches political camps.

While we pay particular attention to political polarization in the book, we hope scholars with interests across a variety of hypothesized media effects will find it of use. Its implications go far beyond the specific media effects studied in the book (including issue opinions, evaluations of political leaders, and judgments about mass media). We develop a motivational model of media use and test our expectations using experimental designs intended to expand the toolkit of political communication researchers. We embed traditional random assignment, or forced exposure, designs in our studies, alongside new techniques that allow us to gauge the effects of self-selection and audience member decisions. Many of our studies incorporate treatments where participants are handed a remote control and allowed to select what to view in a way that emulates naturalistic channel surfing across a constrained set of choices constructed for the laboratory setting. We also use a design borrowed from medical research we call the participant preference design, which allows us to capture what types of programs our research subjects prefer before assigning them to a program to watch.

As others, including Shanto Iyengar and Lance Bennett have warned, the future of political communication research hinges in part on finding new ways to study viewer choices in the modern hyper-choice environment. We think Changing Minds or Changing Channels? makes some strides in that direction and will help further our understanding of contemporary media effects.

This feature of this issue is the future of political communication research. The five wonderful essays submitted for this feature come from very different perspectives, but raise very important ideas about challenges and opportunites for political communication scholars.

1. Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson discuss media fragmentation and political disengagement. They argue that the media environment allows citizens to choose around news and political content.

2. Catie Snow Bailard challenges us to think about the diffusion of information and communication technologies across the globe and the opportunites for field experiments.

3. Matt Levendusky also considers media choice to be an important component of political communication. He describes how partisan media can have polarizing effects on the electorate.

4. Richard Stanton asks how our teaching and practice in the political communication sphere can be updated. He describes his experimentation with conducting class over Twitter (a twecture!).

5. Dhavan Shah, Chris Wells, Alex Hanna, and JungHwan Yang provide insight from their work with Big Data and delve into how the availability of new datasets can help us learn more about political communication.

Letter from the Editor

Greetings and welcome to The Political Communication Report, the newsletter for the Political Communication Divisions of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the International Communication Association (ICA)!

The 2015 conference season is over. Again, our divisions–its leadership and members–organized a great set of events to facilitate  presentation and discussion of some of the best current research in political communication. From pre- and postconferences focused on topics of special interest,themed panel and roundtable discussions through programs of our general conferences that displayed the whole range of contemporary work in political communication, our divisions againrealized diverse opportunities for face-to-face discussion of the questions we are facing in our field today.

In this fall issue of PCR, we throw two spotlights on this year’s conference activities in our divisions. First, we present to you a symposium on Jennifer Stromer-Galley’s recent book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age, based on the contributions to an author-meets-critics roundtable at the Political Communication Preconference at the 2015 APSA meeting.

Another important part of our annual meetings is to not only discuss but also honor the best research in political communication done today. In order to further highlight this work, we also present to you in this issue of PCR a series of mini-interviews with the authors of all best-paper awards given by our divisions this year.

(a) Symposium: Jennifer Stromer-Galley’s Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (Oxford University Press, 2014)

The 2015 APSA Political Communication Preconference last month in San Francisco saw a lively author-meets-critics roundtable on Jennifer Stromer-Galley’s (2014) Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age. We document the discussion, with contributions from all critics and including Stromer-Galley’s response. The symposium is introduced by the organizer of the preconference, Kathleen Searles, whom I thank for the organization of the debate and help with documenting it in written.

Here are direct  links to the individual contributions:

(b) Feature: Mini-Interviews with the 2015 Best-Paper Awardees

This year again, the APSA and ICA meetings not only featured outstanding research on political communication but also awarded it! We did not let them get of the hook that easily and asked the lead author of each paper a few questions. Do make sure to check out their answers and, most importantly, the excellent work of these fine political communication scholars!

(c) Announcements with particular relevance to the field and our divisions.

If you have not already done so, please also join our divisions on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels to receive the most up-to-date information on job postings, calls for papers, etc.

As always, my thanks go out to all contributors to this issue of the newsletter. We hope you will enjoy this issue and look forward to hearing your thoughts about it.

With best wishes for a wonderful, and wonderfully productive fall!

Eike Mark Rinke
University of Mannheim, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research

Announcements for Political Communication Scholars

NEWS FROM THE DIVISION/SECTION

Make Sure to Subscribe to Our Social Media Channels!

BOOKS ANNOUNCEMENTS

‘Can the Media Serve Democracy?,‘ by Stephen Coleman, Giles Moss, Katy Parry (Eds.)

‘News: The Politics of Illusion,’ by W. Lance Bennett, now published at University of Chicago Press

MAKE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE OUR SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS!

The bulk of current information about opportunities for political communication researchers is published through our social media channels, especially via Facebook and Twitter. If you want to receive running news about job postings, calls for papers and book chapters, and information about conferences and workshops of special interest to scholars working in political communciation, make sure to subscribe to our lively social media presences.

The best way to keep track of and spread the word on publication, presentation, training, and job opportunities for political communication researchers is to join the APSA/ICA Political Communication group on Facebook! Here you can share with divsion members information about upcoming conferences, seek collaboration for projects, display job posting information, carry on political communication discussion, etc. Please also invite your political communication colleagues to join and upload your own postings!

Also make sure to subscribe to our divisions’ various other social media channels!

You can find APSA/ICA Political Communication at Twitter — LinkedIn —  Flickr — Academia.edu — Academic Room

CAN THE MEDIA SERVE DEMOCRACY? ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JAY G. BLUMLER JUST PUBLISHED

Can the Media Serve Democracy?, edited by Stephen Coleman, Giles Moss and Katy Parry, has just been published by  Palgrave MacMillan. In it, leading international scholars of political communication debate this important question from a range of perspectives. Authors of the collection’s 19 chapters hail from six different national backgrounds and include such field-shaping figures as Lance Bennett, Denis McQuail, Sonia Livingstone, Elihu Katz, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, James Curran and Winfried Schulz, among others. The essays were brought together as a Festschrift in honour of Jay G. Blumler, an interview with whom in the book’s concluding chapter presents his latest ideas on democracy, citizenship and the media under the title of `Values Are Always at Stake’.

For additional information on the book click here.

CLASSIC NEWS: THE POLITICS OF ILLUSION NOW PUBLISHED BY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

News about News: The Politics of Illusion by Lance Bennett:fdfsfdfsdfFor many years this text has been published by Pearson (at a rather high price). The good news is that the book has moved to University of Chicago Press, which has republished the 9th edition for fall 2015 adoption and will publish the 10th edition for fall of 2016.

For examination copy and adoption information click here.

Mini-Interviews with the 2015 PolComm Best-Paper Awardees

This year again, the APSA and ICA meetings not only featured outstanding research on political communication but also awarded it! We did not let them get of the hook that easily and asked the lead author of each paper a few questions. Do make sure to check out their answers and, most importantly, the excellent work of these fine political communication scholars!

Interviews with the 2015 APSA Political Communication Best Paper Awardees

1. Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award: Joanne M. Miller and Kyle L. Saunders (with Christina Farhart) for ‘Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust’

2. Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award: Matthew N. Tokeshi for ‘Countering Implicit Appeals: Which Strategies Work?’

Interviews with the 2015 ICA Political Communication Best Paper Awardees

3. Best Faculty Paper Award: Shira Dvir-Gvirsman (with R. Kelly Garrett and Yariv Tsfati) for ‘Why Do Partisan Audience Participate? Perceived Public Opinion as the Mediating Mechanism’

4. Best Student Paper Award: Mark Boukes (with Hajo Boomgaarden, Marjolein Moorman, and Claes de Vreese) for ‘It’s Fun! But is it Effective? The Appreciation, Processing, and Persuasiveness of Political Satire’

5. Top-Three Student Paper Award: Lotte Melenhorst for ‘The Media’s Role in Lawmaking: A Case Study Analysis’

6. Top-Three Student Paper Award: Eran Amsalem (with Tamir Sheafer, Stefaan Walgrave, Peter John Loewen, and Stuart N. Soroka) for ‘Political Systems, Media Motivation, and the Integrative Complexity of Politicians’