As an installment of Routledge’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Electronic Media Research Series, Political Communication, Culture, and Society focuses on the expansive concept of political communication and illuminates the processes, contents, and effects related to myriad forms and vehicles of political communication. Whether involving traditional print or broadcast media, social media platforms, or face-to-face discussions, political communication today has shaped how we perceive others and understand the world around us, including our place in it, and ultimately, how we engage with others as social, cultural, and political beings. Hailing from multiple locations and drawing on a multitude of theories as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume’s contributors examine how communication intersects with politics in a broad swath of contexts, ranging from climate change to migration to the notion of political correctness. Collectively they ask and answer questions about how today’s richly textured media ecology shapes our political world and how political messages can fuel – and ameliorate – the issues that deeply cleave societies around the globe. Relevant to scholars and students of journalism, media studies, and communication sciences, this volume will help interested readers better understand today’s increasingly complex sociocultural world through the lens of political communication.

Suitable for students and scholars of political communication and mass media in democracies, this book challenges the traditional scholarship on various issues such as: comparative political and media systems; theories of democracy, representation and the public sphere; and, political party communication, marketing and elections.

This book is perhaps the first systematic treatment of politics from the perspective of cultural psychology. Politics is a complex that psychology usually fails to understand— as it assumes a position in society that attempts to be free of politics itself. Politics is associated both with an everyday practice, and the dynamics of globalization; with the way group conflicts, ideologies, social representations and identities, are lived and co-constructed by social actors. The authors of the book address these issues through their research grounded in different parts of the world, on democracy and political order, the social representation of power, gender studies, the use of metaphors and symbolic power in political discourse, social identities and methodological questions. The book will be used by social and political psychologists but is also of interest to the other social sciences: political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists, and it is at a level where sophisticated lay public would be able to appreciate its coverage. Its use in upperlevel college teaching is possible, and expected at graduate/postgraduate levels.

Culture, Race, and Class-Based Perspectives in Public Relations, edited by Damion Waymer, covers timely and understudied topics in the field of public relations (PR). Via research, case analysis, and theoretical discussion, the contributors to this volume explore the ways that scholars can address issues of voice (or the lack thereof) that marginalized publics have encountered in the past or are currently encountering in regard to matters of culture, race, and class. A central question this book asks is what role can and does a greater understanding of culture, race, and class play in helping scholars, teachers, students, and practitioners to aid in society becoming a better place to live and work? Culture as well as other divisive social constructs such as race and class must be unpacked, problematized, and considered carefully before the fully functioning vision of society can be deemed possible. Some topics included are the Black Panther Party and Native American Activist rhetorical PR, risk equity, critical race theory, and pedagogical approaches to teaching culture, race, and class. This edited volume serves an important early step by scholars—via the context of public relations—in this process of advocating social justice as well as organizations' role in helping society achieve these ends.

"The Propaganda Society analyzes the rapid expansion of propaganda and promotional activities in the leading 'post-industrial' states under the regime of neoliberalism. With the outsourcing of manufacturing, these states have converted to service, selling, and speculative economies, with a concurrent rapid growth of advertising, marketing, public relations, sales management, branding, and other promotional enterprises. Aided by digital technologies and the removal - 'deregulation' - of political, legal, administrative, and moral barriers to state and corporate expansion on a global scale, a group of dominant political and commercial actors have brought about a common discourse and convergent set of practices rooted in sophisticated and unprecedented levels of propaganda and promotion. Written by leading scholars in the field, each of the eighteen chapters in this book discuss the ways in which elite uses of propaganda have radically transformed media and information systems, political and public culture, the conduct of war and foreign relations, and the overall behavior of the state."-- Back cover.

Societies around the world have experienced a flood of information from diverse channels originating beyond local communities and even national borders, transmitted through the rapid expansion of cosmopolitan communications. For more than half a century, conventional interpretations, Norris and Inglehart argue, have commonly exaggerated the potential threats arising from this process. A series of firewalls protect national cultures. This book develops a new theoretical framework for understanding cosmopolitan communications and uses it to identify the conditions under which global communications are most likely to endanger cultural diversity. The authors analyze empirical evidence from both the societal level and the individual level, examining the outlook and beliefs of people in a wide range of societies. The study draws on evidence from the World Values Survey, covering 90 societies in all major regions worldwide from 1981 to 2007. The conclusion considers the implications of their findings for cultural policies.

It is widely recognised that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses the media to set the agenda for political discourse, propagate official policies, monitor public opinion, and rally regime support. State agencies in China control the full spectrum of media programming, either through ownership or the power to regulate. Political Communication in China examines the two factors which have contributed to the rapid development of media infrastructure in China: technology and commercialization. Economic development led to technological advancement, which in turn brought about the rapid modernization of all forms of communication, from ‘old’ media such as television to the Internet, cell phones, and satellite communications. This volume examines how these recent developments have affected the relationship between the CCP and the mass media as well as the implications of this evolving relationship for understanding Chinese citizens’ media use, political attitudes, and behaviour. The chapters in this book represent a diverse range of research methods, from surveys, content analysis, and field interviews to the manipulation of aggregate statistical data. The result is a lively debate which creates many opportunities for future research into the fundamental question of convergence between political and media regimes. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Political Communication.