Rethinking the Vote examines the 2000 U.S. presidential election, putting forth a constructive effort to learn from what transpired and offering potential solutions for the future. Featuring work by leading academics and participants in the real-world drama of this election, it examines the legal, political, and institutional problems of administering elections in the U.S. This timely collection of essays begins and ends with questions about the prospects and possibilities for reform.

Product Description: Rather than taking a traditional view of media influence flowing over a relatively passive audience, the contributors to this volume of essays treat political communication as an interactive process of making meaning. Meaning refers to what one intends to convey especially through language, as well as to what is actually conveyed and reflects the processes of message creation and interpretation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The most comprehensive portrait of a presidential campaign in more than a decade, Crosstalk focuses on the 1992 U.S. presidential race and looks at how citizens use information in the media to make their voting decisions and how politicians and the media interact to shape that information.Examining political advertisements, news coverage, ad watches, and talk shows in Los Angeles, Boston, Winston-Salem, and Fargo/Moorhead, the authors chart the impact of different information environments on citizens and show how people developed images of candidates over the course of the campaign. Crosstalk presents persuasive evidence that campaigns do matter, that citizens are active participants in the campaign process, and their perceptions of a candidate's character is the central factor in the voting process.This innovative study contributes significantly to our understanding of the 1992 presidential campaign and of campaigns in general, and shows how election campaigns can play an important role in the long-term vitality of democracy. (view table of contents)