The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political ...life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.
This book presents the previously untold history of the use of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning over the last decade. Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than fifty political ...staffers, fieldwork during the 2008 electoral cycle, and archival research, the book follows a group of technically skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama’s historic bid for the presidency. The book contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship from communication, sociology, and political science. The book theorizes processes of innovation in online electoral politics. It shows how the innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between industries, organizational structures that provided a space for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. The book also analyzes how Dean’s former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns. The book shows how organizational contexts shaped the use of tools by the Obama campaign, analyzes the emergence of data systems that facilitate electoral coordination, and reveals how cultural work mobilizes supporters to participate in collective action.
The rapid growth of the conservative movement has long
fascinated historians, many of whom have focused on the grassroots
efforts in the Sunbelt. Empire of Direct Mail examines how
conservative ...operatives got their message out to their supporters
through computerized direct mail, a significant but understudied
communications technology.
The story centers on Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of political
direct mail who was known as the "Funding Father" of the
conservative movement. His consulting firm established a database
of conservative prospects and mailed millions of unsolicited
letters. By the 1970s, Viguerie emerged as the central fundraiser
in conservative politics, financing right-wing organizations and
politicians such as George Wallace, Jesse Helms, and Ronald
Reagan.
Moriyama shows that the rise of right-wing direct mail
communication in the postwar years coincided with a new strategy:
the use of this new technology to stoke negative emotions, such as
fury and fear, among the letter recipients. In the period of
broadcasting, conservative fundraisers established the new approach
of targeting individual voters and promoting negative emotions to
win elections.
Before Rush Limbaugh's talk show, Fox News, Twitter, and
Cambridge Analytica, conservatives used direct mail to spread
messages of anxiety and anger to raise funds and mobilize the
grassroots. Through extensive archival research of fundraising
activities in the conservative movement and key elections from 1950
to 1980, Empire of Direct Mail offers a political history
of the role played by communications technology in the development
of modern US conservatism.
This book is published as part of the Sustainable History
Monograph Pilot, with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
The internet is facilitating a generational transition within America’s advocacy group system. New “netroots” political associations have arisen in the past decade and play an increasingly prominent ...role in citizen political mobilization. At the same time, the organizations that mediate citizen political engagement and sustained collective action are changing. They rely upon modified staff structures and work routines. They employ novel strategies and tactical repertoires. Rather than “organizing without organizations,” the new media environment has given rise to “organizing through different organizations.” This book provides a richly detailed analysis of this disruptive transformation. It highlights changes in membership and fundraising regimes—established industrial patterns of supporter interaction and revenue streams—that were pioneered by MoveOn.org and have spread broadly within the advocacy system. Through interviews, content analysis, and direct observation of the leading netroots organizations, the book offers fresh insights into 21st-century political organizing. The book highlights important variations among the new organizations—including internet-mediated issue generalists like MoveOn, community blogs like DailyKos.com, and neo-federated groups like DemocracyforAmerica.com. It also explores a wider set of netroots infrastructure organizations that provide supporting services to membership-based advocacy associations. The rise of the political netroots has had a distinctly partisan character: conservatives have repeatedly tried and failed to build equivalents to the organizations and infrastructure of the progressive netroots. The book investigates these efforts, as well as the late-forming Tea Party movement, and introduces the theory of Outparty Innovation Incentives as an explanation for the partisan adoption of political technology.
This book is the first in a planned trilogy by Pippa Norris on challenges of electoral integrity to be published by Cambridge University Press. Unfortunately too often elections around the globe are ...deeply flawed or even fail. Why does this matter? It is widely suspected that such contests will undermine confidence in elected authorities, damage voting turnout, trigger protests, exacerbate conflict, and occasionally lead to regime change. Well-run elections, by themselves, are insufficient for successful transitions to democracy. But flawed, or even failed, contests are thought to wreck fragile progress. Is there good evidence for these claims? Under what circumstances do failed elections undermine legitimacy? With a global perspective, using new sources of data for mass and elite evidence, this book provides fresh insights into these major issues.
Inside Campaigns Feltus, William J., IV; Goldstein, Kenneth M; Dallek, Matthew J. (Jeremy)
2018, 2019, 2018-07-04, 2018-07-18
eBook
"Inside Campaigns: Elections Through the Eyes of Political Professionals is essential reading not only for students interested in running campaigns and for journalism students who want to cover ...politics, but for campaign operatives generally and journalists who want to raise the level of their game. In fact, it's good reading for everybody." --Thomas B. Edsall, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism "Much of our useful knowledge sits at the intersection of disciplines. Inside Campaigns demonstrates that through a skillful combination of political science with management in a highly readable and practical format. A first for this field!" --Leonard A. Schlesinger, Baker Foundation Professor-Harvard Business School, President Emeritus-Babson College Inside Campaigns, Second Edition takes readers on a journey into the world of campaign managers. Powered by scores of interviews and surveys of political professionals, the book considers the purpose, potency, and poetry of modern political campaigns in the US. The expert author team draw from years of scholarly research and professional campaign experience to guide readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the ways campaigns are managed, the strategies that are employed, the roles played by both staff and the candidates, and the affects election outcomes have on American democracy. Readers will develop an understanding of what campaigns do and why they matter, as well as gain practical skills for working in a campaign or advocating for a cause. New to the Second Edition: A case study created from an in-depth interview with Bernie Sanders' top digital decision-makers describes how the Sanders' campaign used digital media to harness the energy of their highly motivated base supporters. This case shows students a real-life campaign decision-making situation, and demonstrates how campaigns
use new digital media to drive traditional news media coverage. A unique joint interview with the top media buyers from the Clinton and Trump campaigns reveals how each campaign tracked the other's advertising and adjusted their own advertising based on competitive tracking information. This interview illustrates to students how modern campaigns use media tracking technologies to monitor their opposition and spend tens of millions of dollars at the presidential level. A top Trump digital manager shares inside details of how the Republican National Committee moved quickly to help build out the Trump digital operations after it was clear that Trump would be the party's presidential nominee. This insight helps students understand how the Trump campaign answered, "What do we tell them?" by testing messages online, including recycling Trump's personal tweets in instant messages and emails. The differences between how the Clinton and Trump campaigns managed the news media are highlighted in a case study of one journalist's experiences covering both campaigns. This case study helps the student build skills for becoming a "spinmeister" who handles day-to-day relationships with the news media. The authors' research surprisingly reveals that, behind the scenes, Trump was much more available to reporters than Clinton, despite Trump's continuous public attacks on the "fake news media.".
Roderick Hart may be among the few Americans who believe that what politicians say in a campaign actually matters. He also believes that campaigns work. Even as television coverage, political ads, ...and opinion polls turn elections into field days for marketing professionals, Hart argues convincingly that campaigns do play their role in sustaining democracy, mainly because they bring about a dialogue among candidates, the press, and the people. Here he takes a close look at the exchange of ideas through language used in campaign speeches, political advertising, public debates, print and broadcast news, and a wide variety of letters to the editor. In each case, the participants choose their words differently, and this, according to Hart, can be a frustrating challenge to anyone trying to make sense of the issues. Yet he finds that the process is good for Americans: campaigns inform us about issues, sensitize us to the concerns of others, and either encourage us to vote or at least heighten our sense of the political world.
In 2008, Barack Obama's presidential campaign used an innovative combination of social media, big data, and micro-targeting to win the White House. In 2012, the campaign did it again, further honing ...those marketing tools and demonstrating that political marketing is on the cutting edge when it comes to effective branding, advertising, and relationship-building. The challenges facing a presidential campaign may be unique to the political arena, but the creative solutions are not. The Marketing Revolution in Politics shows how recent US presidential campaigns have adopted the latest marketing techniques and how organizations in the for-profit and non-profit sectors can benefit from their example. Distilling the marketing practices of successful political campaigns down into seven key lessons, Bruce I. Newman shows how organizations of any size can apply the same innovative, creative, and cost-effective marketing tactics as today's presidential hopefuls. A compelling study of marketing in the make-or-break world of American politics, this book should be a must-read for managers, students of marketing and political marketing, and anyone interested in learning more about how presidential campaigns operate.
The race card Mendelberg, Tali
2017., 20171009, 2017, 2001, 2017-10-09
eBook
Examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so. This book analyzes the causes, dynamics, and consequences of racially loaded political communication.
Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office explores the factors that drive political ambition at the earliest stages. Using data from a comprehensive survey of ...thousands of eligible candidates, Jennifer L. Lawless systematically investigates what compels certain citizens to pursue elective positions and others to recoil at the notion. Lawless assesses personal factors, such as race, gender and family dynamics, that affect an eligible candidate's likelihood of considering a run for office. She also focuses on eligible candidates' professional lives and attitudes toward the political system.
