This book examines the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, activists, presidents, and contemporary actors who play a large role in helping to define American civil religion. It demonstrates how America's civil religion is forged through contestations of its beliefs, rituals, places, events, and myths by different groups and individuals.

Drawing on a decade of their own research from the 2000 to 2012 U.S. presidential elections, Renita Coleman and Denis Wu explore the image presentation of political candidates and its influence at both aggregate and individual levels. When facing complex political decisions, voters often rely on gut feelings and first impressions but then endeavor to come up with a rational reason to justify their actions. Image and Emotion in Voter Decisions: The Affect Agenda examines how and why voters make the decisions they do by examining the influence of the media s coverage of politicians images....

This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues--predominantly purpose--exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid....

James T. Kitchens and Larry Powell examine why political messages appeal to voters in the United States by exploring the four pillars of the American psyche: fear, national narcissism, consumerism, and religiosity. These pillars, combined with the related matrix of attitudes, beliefs, and values, determine how political communication is understood.

Political Campaign Communication: Theory, Method, and Practice brings a diversity of issues, topics, and events on political campaign communication around the concepts of theory, method and practice. The volume contains studies of political campaign communication utilizing a wide range of empirical, rhetorical, content analyses and social science methodologies as well as a variety of foci on the practice of political campaign communication with studies on the communication dimensions and elements of political campaigns. It reflects the growing depth, breadth, and maturity of the discipline...

This book examines the presidency's relationship with television entertainment, particularly late night comic talk shows. It covers presidential campaigns and administrations from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

The Culture of Blame and Payback in American Democracy looks at the forces that have developed over the past 50-plus years and created a dysfunctional political system in the United States. It argues that the current level of partisan polarization is actually the culmination of a number of forces at work during the past few decades. These include a perception by each party that the other is using unfair political tactics, the subsequent creation of a culture of blame with each party blaming the other for the dysfunction, a decline in political norms leading to childlike behavior by...

This book utilizes a theoretically informed framework for analyzing the effectiveness of the president's economic rhetoric and employs an empirical assessment that measures rhetoric's effect on economic actors. The analysis suggests that the rhetoric presidents use has little influence in shaping the behaviors of these economic actors.

This edited collection explores a wide range of communication elements and themes representing a variety of topics and methodologies relating to the 2016 US presidential election. The chapters focus on the role and function of communication across all phases, issues, and messaging in the election campaigns.

Web 2.0 and the Political Mobilization of College Students investigates young adults' political participation by looking at their online activities and the ways in which these forums help mobilize young adults to participate in their political system online and offline.