The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns

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University of Chicago Press, 2020 M05 15 - 332 páginas
The Reasoning Voter is an insider's look at campaigns, candidates, media, and voters that convincingly argues that voters make informed logical choices. Samuel L. Popkin analyzes three primary campaigns—Carter in 1976; Bush and Reagan in 1980; and Hart, Mondale, and Jackson in 1984—to arrive at a new model of the way voters sort through commercials and sound bites to choose a candidate. Drawing on insights from economics and cognitive psychology, he convincingly demonstrates that, as trivial as campaigns often appear, they provide voters with a surprising amount of information on a candidate's views and skills. For all their shortcomings, campaigns do matter.

"Professor Popkin has brought V.O. Key's contention that voters are rational into the media age. This book is a useful rebuttal to the cynical view that politics is a wholly contrived business, in which unscrupulous operatives manipulate the emotions of distrustful but gullible citizens. The reality, he shows, is both more complex and more hopeful than that."—David S. Broder, The Washington Post
 

Contenido

Prologue
1
1 The Reasoning Voter
7
The Process of Becoming Informed
22
Information Shortcuts
44
Evidence and Inference in Voting
72
5 Attributable Benefits and Political Symbols
96
Surges and Declines in Presidential Primaries
115
Watergate and the Rise of Jimmy Carter
149
George Bush Ronald Reagan and the Legacy of 76
167
9 The Fight to Redirect the Democratic Coalition in 1984
184
10 Conclusion
212
11 The Election of 1992
237
Notes
265
Bibliography
293
Index
313
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