Prior research determines whether politicians at rallies make programmatic, clientelist or personalist appeals. We argue that this reductive approach obscures the variety of meaning-making rallies. offer a vision as complex communicative events, which multiple actors co- and counter-produce messages in numerous ways. Nonetheless, we there are patterns Rallies produced accordance with genre guid...

The politics of change are both played out within the arena of discourse and dedicated to transforming that arena. In this article, we bring together critical discourse theory and political process theory in order to highlight the ways in which a process of discourse transformation can be deployed by organisations to effect political and economic change. In the process we examine the discursive...

Drawing on the theoretical view of cyberspace’s role in engagement in public discourse and civic activities, the current study investigates how social media use is related to public discourse and civic engagement in mainland China. Moreover, we examine how political interest, general trust in people, and life satisfaction modify the interdependence of social media use and public discourse and c...

Does incivility in political discourse have adverse effects on public regard for politics? If so, why? In this study we present a theory suggesting that when viewers are exposed to televised political disagreement, it often violates well-established face-to-face social norms for the polite expression of opposing views. As a result, incivility in public discourse adversely affects trust in gover...

I BEGIN WITH A QUANDARY that is very familiar to Martin Ostwald: Classical Athens saw the invention of both democracy and political theory, yet while we have a number of examples of criticism of democracy, no systematic defense of democracy-no democratic theory-survives from an Athenian pen. I propose that the conundrum is best explained by assuming that from the late fifth through the late fou...

Minnesota State Senate candidate Matt Little uses an app that few other politicians use, TikTok, to try distinguish himself from and often devotes a lot of time "branding" efforts. This article looks at how is using this new has emerged in recent years - TikTok communicate civilly educate people way. The results the study show achieved good by communicating with young on their favorite platform...

The financing of political campaigns is an area of active scholarly study. I review some of the recent literature and discuss important methodological issues that arise in empirical research on campaign expenditures and campaign contributions. The effects of campaign expenditures and advertising on candidate and ballot-measure elections are summarized, as are the impacts of contributions on con...

This paper argues that limits on campaign contributions may well be Pareto improving even under the most optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters. The argument assumes that candidates use campaign contributions to convey truthful information to voters about their qualifications for office and that voters update their beliefs rationally on ...

T he all-encompassing goal of political campaigns is to maximize the probability of victory. To that end, every facet of a campaign is evaluated by how many votes an activity will generate and at what cost. To perform this cost–benefi t analysis, campaigns need accurate predictions about the preferences of voters, their expected behaviors, and their responses to campaign outreach. For instance,...