Political Communication Research: Approaches, Studies, Assessments

Experimental Designs for Political Communication Research

Introduction As recently as three decades ago, the use of experimental methods was a rarity in the disciplines of political science, sociology, and communications. Beginning in the early 1980s, a surge of interest in the interdisciplinary field of political psychology set in motion a trickle of experimental methods into several sub-fields of political science, including political communication....

Government Communication: An Emerging Field in Political Communication Research

In February 2009, the US Congress passed a US$787 billion stimulus package designed to put the country on the road to economic recovery. Thereafter, managing ‘the stimulus story’ became, as Time magazine reported, ‘a full-time White House preoccupation’ (Scherer, 2009: 31). Obama and his team understood that without a concerted effort to communicate the plan, it would almost certainly fail in t...

Comparative Political Studies

Why do groups want to secede and where is demand for self-determination most likely to arise? We argue self-determination demand is moderated by the projected economic costs of policy autonomy. The trade-off between income and sovereignty implies that, other things being equal, richer regions are more likely to demand more autonomy. This trade-off suggests that relative regional income is a key...

Comparative Political Studies

Comparative Political Studies

This article investigates changes within national budget by examining actors’ behavioral predilections and the institutional constraints under which they operate. The article presents three theoretical propositions about the influence of attention and institutions on all magnitudes of programmatic budget changes ranging from large cuts to massive expansions. Using quantile regression, the autho...