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"Mediated Democracy: Politics, the News, and Citizenship in the 21st Century takes a contemporary, communications-oriented perspective on the central questions pertaining to the health of democracies and relationships between citizens, journalists, and political elites. The approach marries clear syntheses of cutting-edge research with practical advice explaining why the insights of scholarship affects students' lives. With active, engaging writing, the text will thoroughly explain why things are the way they are, how they got that way, and how students can use the insights of political communication research to do something about it as citizens"--

▪ Abstract  Although the study of realignment is an essential component of the rich and fruitful tradition of examining long-term partisan change, questions about the usefulness of the concept persist. We seek to redirect and reinvigorate the study of lasting political change by evaluating the critiques of classic realignment theory, examining the issue evolution perspective, and assessing whether the theory of issue evolution can be used to explain recent research on the relationship between political issues and partisan change. Our review of the theoretical and empirical literature investigating political issues and party alignments sheds light on both the utility of the issue evolution perspective and the conditions under which durable changes in party alignments are most likely to occur.

Although the study of realignment is an essential component of the rich & fruitful tradition of examining long-term partisan change, questions about the usefulness of the concept persist. We seek to redirect & reinvigorate the study of lasting political change by evaluating the critiques of classic realignment theory, examining the issue evolution perspective, & assessing whether the theory of issue evolution can be used to explain recent research on the relationship between political issues & partisan change. Our review of the theoretical & empirical literature investigating political issues & party alignments sheds light on both the utility of the issue evolution perspective & the conditions under which durable changes in party alignments are most likely to occur. References. Adapted from the source document.

Battleground state polls are a prominent part of U.S. election news coverage. In this experimental study (N = 863), we tested how polling results impact how partisans evaluate the news stories through which the polls are reported. Consistent with the hostile media perception, partisans tended to see articles as biased against their candidate, and perceived bias was amplified when their candidate trailed in the poll. Additionally, we found that a majority of news consumers believed the article would encourage their political copartisans in battleground states to vote, but would not impact the voting behavior of their political opponents.

AbstractHow do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the success of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with and without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines more in districts with term-limited legislators. Furthermore, the majority party is more strategic in reallocating voters for partisan gain in term-limited districts. Thus, our findings suggest that term limits make the redistricting process more partisan and that a reform intended to remove incumbents from the legislature actually strengthens the majority party.It's ironic that one of the few things that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld as a factor you can use in redrawing districts is incumbency, and we're going to be redrawing state legislative districts right after term limits take effect in the Senate. We won't have any incumbents in those districts.—Arkansas Attorney General Mark Pryor

How do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the successes of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with & without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines more in districts with term-limited legislators. Furthermore, the majority party is more strategic in reallocating voters for partisan gain in term-limited districts. Thus, our findings suggest that term limits make the redistricting process more partisan & that a reform intended to remove incumbents from the legislature actually strengthens the majority party. 4 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 35 References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractIn the days after the 2016 election, a variety of explanations has been offered to explain Donald Trump's unique ascendancy in American politics. Scholars have discussed Trump's appeal to rural voters, his hybrid media campaign strategy, shifts in voter turnout, Hillary Clinton's campaign advertising strategy, economic anxiety, differences in sexist and racist attitudes among Trump voters and so forth. Here, we add another key factor to the conversation: Trump's appeal to a smaller, often ignored, segment of the electorate: populist voters. Building upon our previous work – demonstrating that while American political elites compete across a single dimension of conflict, the American people organize their attitudes around two distinct dimensions, one economic and one social – we use 2008 American National Elections Study (ANES) data and 2016 ANES primary election data to show that populist support for Trump, and nationalist policies themselves, help us to understand how Trump captured the Republican nomination and the White House.

How has the American public responded to elite partisan polarization? Using panel data from both the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project and the American National Election Studies, we explore the partisan consequences of the discrepancy between the one-dimensional structure of elite policy preferences and the two-dimensional structure of citizens' policy preferences. We find that those citizens with preferences that are consistently liberal or consistently conservative across both economic and social issues have responded to elite polarization with mass polarization. However, we also find that the sizable number of citizens who hold preferences on economic and social issues that do not perfectly match the menu of options provided by elite Republicans and Democrats have not responded to elite polarization; indeed, these citizens are more likely to shift their partisan allegiance in the short-term and less likely to strengthen their party identification in the long term.

That Democrats are widely perceived as a pro‐choice party while Republicans are generally perceived as a pro‐life party seems apparent to even the most casual observer of American politics. Yet, this perception was not always as clear as it is today. Our understanding of the partisan evolution of the abortion issue in the United States is informed by previous research demonstrating that changes in the abortion issue at both the elite and mass level conform to Carmines and Stimson's issue evolution model of partisan dynamics. However, an important piece of this puzzle remains unresolved—how does the issue differentiation between the parties get communicated from elite party actors to the mass public? Analyzing over 30 years of several sources of news coverage on abortion, we show that over time, news stories revealed a closer link between particular interest groups and political parties, with the Republican Party becoming aligned with pro‐life interest groups while the Democrats were identified with pro‐choice groups. We posit that media coverage of the interaction between interest groups and political parties on abortion highlighted the issue's increasing political relevance in the minds of the American public and helped to communicate the parties' evolving issue positions to the wider electorate.Que el partido demócrata está a favor del aborto mientras que el partido republicano está en contra parece obvio aún para cualquier observador de la política estadounidense. A pesar de esto, esta división no siempre fue tan clara como lo es ahora. Nuestra comprensión de la evolución del tópico del aborto en los partidos de los Estados Unidos está fundada en investigaciones previas que demuestran que los cambios en el tema del aborto, tanto en la elite como el público, se ajustan al modelo de evolución de las dinámicas partidistas de Carmines and Stimson. Sin embargo, una pieza importante de este rompecabezas queda sin resolver—¿cómo se comunican las diferencias entre las posturas partidistas sobre diversos asuntos, desde las elites partidistas al público en general? Analizando varias fuentes sobre la cobertura de noticias del aborto por cerca de 30 años, demostramos que a través del tiempo las noticias revelan un vínculo más cercano entre grupos de intereses particulares y los partidos políticos, con el partido republicano favoreciendo a los grupos de interés pro‐vida y los demócratas a los grupos pro‐aborto. Proponemos que la cobertura de los medios sobre la interacción entre los grupos de interés y los partidos políticos sobre el aborto puso de manifiesto la creciente relevancia del tópico en las mentes del público estadounidense y ayudó a comunicar al electorado cómo evolucionaron las posiciones de los partidos.