Ebook: American Politics Today Essential

Published in USA The Great Divide: Campaign Media in the American Mind Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics in the Annenberg Public Policy Center. His publications include Population-based Survey Experiments (2011), Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy (2006), Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (1998), as well as many journal articles on the impact of media on American politics. As a scholar of media and politics, I am frequently asked to participate in media commentary during election years. Although I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of academic outreach to the larger world, I suspect that this is my least favorite part of my job. Media and politics about which I am writing are both wide and deep. They converge around my relative naiveté in understanding the sheer power of the monster. When I take part in a radio call-in program or appear on an election-night television broadcast, then I, too, become part of the monster, wielding its incredible power while simultaneously denying its very existence. While both the public and academics agree that media have influence in elections, the scales on which these two entities believe media matter suggest an enormous chasm. Public perceptions of the power of media in elections, and the academic evidence of its influence, could not be further apart.