How the Obama Presidency Changed the Political Landscape PDF Download

Author: Larry J. Walker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Covering key issues ranging from education to political mobilization to racial stratification, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the Obama Presidency. President Barack Obama's election and subsequent reelection represent a critical paradigm shift in American political history. But are there lasting effects of the election of an African American to the highest office in the land in terms of the United States' economic, educational, political and social realities? A valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, state and federal policymakers, and general readers, this book poses critical questions and offers insightful answers from expert contributors, provides a balanced critique of President Obama's accomplishments and challenges, and considers the national and international impact President Obama's tenure had on politics. The numerous contributors to this book provide a range of perspectives on President Obama's presidency that question conventional thinking, covering key issues that include health care, education, political mobilization, gender, racial stratification, voting patterns, and criminal justice. Readers will come away with a heightened comprehension of the complex relationships between political structures, economic policies, and minority interests; how Congress, traditional and contemporary activists, and domestic and international issues all shaped the Obama Presidency; and how micro and macro issues such as voting rights, voting patterns, and Get Out the Vote (GOTV) initiatives are connected.

Author: Byron E. Shafer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045590
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the past quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result: the final tally of votes. Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility: not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence. This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.

Author: Martin Warnke
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674686168
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Whether considering the role of landscape in battle depictions; or investigating monumental figures from the Colossus of Rhodes to Mount Rushmore; or asking why gold backgrounds in paintings gave way to mountains topped with castles; Political Landscape reconfigures our idea of landscape, its significance, and its representations.

Author: Paul Pierson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691122588
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The contemporary American political landscape has been marked by two paradoxical transformations: the emergence after 1960 of an increasingly activist state, and the rise of an assertive and politically powerful conservatism that strongly opposes activist government. Leading young scholars take up these issues in The Transformation of American Politics. Arguing that even conservative administrations have become more deeply involved in managing our economy and social choices, they examine why our political system nevertheless has grown divided as never before over the extent to which government should involve itself in our lives. The contributors show how these two closely linked trends have influenced the reform and running of political institutions, patterns of civic engagement, and capacities for partisan mobilization--and fueled ever-heightening conflicts over the contours and reach of public policy. These transformations not only redefined who participates in American politics and how they do so, but altered the substance of political conflicts and the capacities of rival interests to succeed. Representing both an important analysis of American politics and an innovative contribution to the study of long-term political change, this pioneering volume reveals how partisan discourse and the relationship between citizens and their government have been redrawn and complicated by increased government programs. The contributors are Andrea Louise Campbell, Jacob S. Hacker, Nolan McCarty, Suzanne Mettler, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Mark A. Smith, Steven M. Teles, and Julian E. Zelizer.

Author: Jody C Baumgartner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498565093
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In the past decade various studies have examined how political humor may influence various political attitudes and voting behavior; whether it affects learning, cognition and media literacy, how it might shape political participation; how people process different forms of political humor; and more. This book is devoted to anticipating and addressing where the field of political humor and its effects will move in the next generation of scholarship, exploring the continued evolution of the study of political humor as well as the normative implications of these developments. It includes research accounting for important changes and developments "on the ground" in the political humor landscape. These include the fact that the cadre of late-night television hosts have completely changed in the past 3 years; there are now more late night television choices; and many hosts have become more overtly political in their presentations. Recommended for scholars of communication, media studies, and political science.

Author: James L. Jr Wescoat
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402058497
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This hugely important and timely work asks how politics and economics transform the landscapes we inhabit. It explores the connections between political economy and landscape change through a series of conceptual essays and case studies. In so doing, it speaks to a broad readership of landscape architects, geographers, and related fields of social and environmental research.

Author: Adam T Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520237501
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
"This highly original and challenging book defies every easy form of classification. Ostensibly about early polities, its penetrating and erudite asides extend with equal facility into contemporary politics and the symmetrical deficiencies of modernism and postmodernism. To my knowledge, imaginative reflections of spatial representations have never previously found their way into the theoretical base of what has been thought of as an essentially materialistic archaeological science. It is a pleasure and a discovery to see the permanent and rightful place Adam Smith has now fashioned for them."—Robert McC. Adams, Secretary Emeritus, The Smithsonian Institution "If social theory in cultural anthropology was transformed in the last decades by a 'linguistic turn,' research by archaeologists into the development and practices of early states now seems to be undergoing a 'geographic turn.' Adam Smith's book, although drawing from modern currents in geography, anthropology, sociology, and political philosophy, brings original archaeological contributions to social theory by examining the making and re-making of landscapes in early complex polities (especially in Mesopotamian, Urartian, and Maya states). Smith observes these (and other) early states as 'political landscapes,' in which monuments come to constitute authority and shape memories. Smith's book represents a comprehensive turn from metahistorical reifications of the state to investigations of how the content of social roles was determined through the production of landscapes. The landscape of archaeology will be changed decisively by this book."—Norman Yoffee, Professor, Dept. of Near Eastern Studies and Dept. of Anthropology, University of Michigan. "This book emerges as both a remarkable scholarly achievement and something of a manifesto for contemporary political thinking and engagement."—Susan E. Alcock, author of Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories

Author: Michael Pfau
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742541443
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A sea change is taking place in how people use media, and it affects not only how people perceive political candidates and where they get their information, but also--more broadly--their basic democratic values. Mediating the Vote systematically explores a number of questions about media use and its relation to democratic engagement, analyzing the effects of communication forms on the 2004 presidential elections. Are Democratic and Republican voters increasingly turning to different outlets for information about candidates and campaigns and, if so, what does this mean for political discourse? Which communication forms--newspapers, television news programs, the Internet, or films--had the greatest impact on people's perceptions of the presidential candidates during the 2004 campaigns? Do different forms of media affect people, either intellectually or emotionally, in distinct ways? And do some communication forms elevate, whereas others degrade, basic democratic values? This book probes these questions and more, and the results contribute to an important goal in political communication studies: creating a more refined, integrated, and--ultimately--precise picture of how media affects democratic engagement.

Author: Elizabeth Suhay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190860839
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 912

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Book Description
Elections are the means by which democratic nations determine their leaders, and communication in the context of elections has the potential to shape people's beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Thus, electoral persuasion is one of the most important political processes in any nation that regularly holds elections. Moreover, electoral persuasion encompasses not only what happens in an election but also what happens before and after, involving candidates, parties, interest groups, the media, and the voters themselves. This volume surveys the vast political science literature on this subject, emphasizing contemporary research and topics and encouraging cross-fertilization among research strands. A global roster of authors provides a broad examination of electoral persuasion, with international perspectives complementing deep coverage of U.S. politics. Major areas of coverage include: general models of political persuasion; persuasion by parties, candidates, and outside groups; media influence; interpersonal influence; electoral persuasion across contexts; and empirical methodologies for understanding electoral persuasion.

Author: Maurizio Cotta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000195082
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This book explores the mechanisms of political representation and accountability in the European political system, against the backdrop of multiple crises in recent years in the economic, financial, security and immigration fields, which have triggered strong tensions and centrifugal drives inside the EU and among its member states. Exploiting a rich set of new ad hoc collected data covering elite and public opinion orientations and party positions, it investigates how the current politicization of European issues and the asymmetries among member states can challenge the sustainability of the European Union. It examines how existing policy tools were found largely unable to neutralize promptly the negative effects of these crises on the populations, economies and security of the Union and how this suggests the need to reconsider overarching theoretical frameworks and a more in-depth analysis of some crucial mechanisms of the European political system and to go beyond some of the dominant scholarly debates of the past decades. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of the European Union and more broadly to comparative European politics and international relations.