How often do we hear that Americans are so ignorant about politics that their civic competence is impaired, and that the media are to blame because they do a dismal job of informing the public? Processing Politics shows that average Americans are far smarter than the critics believe. Integrating a broad range of current research on how people learn (from political science, social psychology, communication, physiology, and artificial intelligence), Doris Graber shows that televised presentations—at their best—actually excel at transmitting information and facilitating learning. She critiques current political offerings in terms of their compatibility with our learning capacities and interests, and she considers the obstacles, both economic and political, that affect the content we receive on the air, on cable, or on the Internet. More and more people rely on information from television and the Internet to make important decisions. Processing Politics offers a sound, well-researched defense of these remarkably versatile media, and challenges us to make them work for us in our democracy.

As part of the study of emotions and politics, this book explores connections between affect and cognition and their implications for political evaluation, decision and action. Emphasizing theory, methodology and empirical research, Feeling Politics is an important contribution to political science, sociology, psychology and communications.

Politics of the Administrative Process shows how efficient public administration requires a delicate balance—the bureaucracy must be powerful enough to be effective, but also accountable to elected officials and citizens. Author Don Kettl gives students a realistic, relevant, and well-researched view of the field in this reader–friendly best seller. With its engaging vignettes, rich examples and a unique focus on policymaking and politics, the Seventh Edition continues its strong emphasis on politics, accountability, and performance. This new edition has been thoroughly updated with new scholarship, data, events, and case studies, giving students multiple opportunities to apply ideas and analysis as they read.

In this classic work of sociology, Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the black protest movement in the United States. Moving from theoretical concerns to empirical analysis, he focuses on the crucial role of three institutions that foster protest: black churches, black colleges, and Southern chapters of the NAACP. He concludes that political opportunities, a heightened sense of political efficacy, and the development of these three institutions played a central role in shaping the civil rights movement. In his new introduction, McAdam revisits the civil rights struggle in light of recent scholarship on social movement origins and collective action. "[A] first-rate analytical demonstration that the civil rights movement was the culmination of a long process of building institutions in the black community."—Raymond Wolters, Journal of American History "A fresh, rich, and dynamic model to explain the rise and decline of the black insurgency movement in the United States."—James W. Lamare, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.

Philippe Zittoun analyses the public policymaking process focusing on how governments relentlessly develop proposals to change public policy to address insoluble problems. Rather than considering this surprising Sisyphean effort as a lack of rationality, the author examines it as a political activity that produces order and stability.

The Media and Political Process examines the increasingly topical subject of the political process and assesses: The nature of the relationship between mass media and the political process The impact of media-ization on existing political frameworks The implications of media-ized politics Eric Louw uses a number of case-studies including political, celebrity, war and terrorism to provide a media studies perspective on how media workers (journalists, public affairs officers, spin-doctors) impact upon the political process. The book also considers the media's role in promoting a range of twentieth century ideologies and emerging dominant discourses.

An in-depth analysis of the increasingly important role of cyberspace in the political arena, and the effect that the cyberspace communities, political action groups, and journalists had on the 1996 US Presidential campaign and election.

Educational Change and the Political Process brings together key ideas on both the system of educational policy and the policy process in the United States. It provides students with a broad, methodical understanding of educational policy. No other textbook offers as comprehensive a view of the U.S. educational policy procedure and political systems. Section I discusses the actors and systems that create and implement policy on both the federal and the local level; Section II walks students through the policy process from idea to implementation to evaluation; and Section III delves into three major forces driving the creation of educational policies in the current era—accountability, equity, and market-driven reforms. Each chapter provides case studies, discussion questions, and classroom activities to scaffold learning, as well as a bibliography for further reading to deepen exploration of these topics.

System and Process (1957) broke the mould in political science by combining systems, game, and cybernetic concepts in its theoretical formulations. Since its publication, serious research in international relations has needed to respond to the bold hypotheses that matched equilibrial rules with type of system. Kaplan's life-long interest in finding an objective basis for moral judgments had its scholarly origins in an appendix of this classical book, which incorporated his understanding of philosophy and, in particular, the philosophy of science. A second appendix on 'The Mechanisms of Regulation' explored the cybernetic and recursive nature of knowing.