Manipulating Democracy: Democratic Theory, Political Psychology, and Mass Media

Description

Manipulation is a source of pervasive anxiety in contemporary American politics. Observers charge that manipulative practices in political advertising, media coverage, and public discourse have helped to produce an increasingly polarized political arena, an uninformed and apathetic electorate, election campaigns that exploit public fears and prejudices, a media that titillates rather than educates, and a policy process that too often focuses on the symbolic rather than substantive. Manipulating Democracy offers the first comprehensive dialogue between empirical political scientists and normative theorists on the definition and contemporary practice of democratic manipulation. This impressive array of distinguished scholars―political scientists, philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and communications scholars―collectively draw out the connections between competing definitions of manipulation, the psychology of manipulation, and the political institutions and practices through which manipulation is seen to produce a tightly-knit exploration of an issue at the heart of democratic politics. Book Cover Title Copyright Contents List of Figures and Tables Preface and Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction Manipulating Democracy: A Reappraisal Part I Democratic Theory 1 Manipulation and Democratic Theory 2 Manipulation: As Old as Democracy Itself (and Sometimes Dangerous) 3 When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative: Disentangling Persuasion and Manipulation Part II Political Psychology 4 Changing Brains: Lessons from the Living Wage Campaign 5 Emotional Manipulation of Political Identity 6 Mimesis, Persuasion, and Manipulation in Plato’s Republic Part III Mass Media 7 “News You Can’t Use”: Politics and Democracy in the New Media Environment 8 The Betrayal of Democracy: The Purpose of Public Opinion Survey Research and its Misuse by Presidents 9 The Political Economy of Mass Media: Implications for Informed Citizenship 10 Exploiting the Clueless: Heresthetic, Overload, and Rational Ignorance Index