Political communication relates to the exchange of messages among political actors. For example, most of what politicians do is political communication. Likewise, citizens communicate politics when they discuss political issues with friends or family members, phone in to political radio talks shows, or participate in political chats on the Internet. Demonstrations and other forms of
Political parties are groups that organize to gain political office, control the governing process, mobilize majorities, organize dissent and opposition, and socialize voters. In democratic political systems parties have emerged as the natural evolution of like-minded interests organizing for political influence. Election campaigns are one major battleground on which political parties compete for influence through
Political advertising is a form of political communication that uses the mass media to promote political candidates, parties, policy issues, and/or ideas. Advertising messages are generally controlled messages allowing for direct communication with the public and voters without interpretation or filtering by news media or other sources. In the United States, where political advertising is
“Political cognitions” refers to the ability of human beings to acquire and possess political knowledge through perception, reasoning, or intuition. Citizens’ cognitions about politics come mainly from information supplied by the mass media – television, newspapers, magazines, or the Internet – because most political happenings are beyond the day-to-day experiences of citizens. Dependence on mass
Political sociology analyzes the operation of power in social life, examining the distribution and machination of power at all levels: individual, organizational, communal, national, and international. Defined thus, political science becomes a subfield of sociology. Parsons (1951), for example, treated the political as one of the four principal domains of sociological analysis. In practice, however
A little more than a decade after the demands for Black, Latino/a, and women studies on college campuses across the nation in the late 1960s, universities witnessed a new articulation of inclusion. With the rise of hate speech and racially motivated incidents on campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, universities began to find ways to