Product Description: This book addresses opinion leadership in democratic politics as a process whereby individuals send and receive information through their informally based networks of political communication. The analyses are based on a series of small group experiments, conducted by the authors, which build on accumulated evidence from more than seventy years of survey data regarding political communication among interdependent actors...read more

Product Description: One of the central questions in politics is from where people derive their tastes and opinions. Why do some people embrace the free market, while others prefer an interventionist state? From where do preferences for a vigorous foreign policy or for sterner policing of moral issues come? As has been shown, political preferences may be influenced by perceived benefits, the media, or public intellectuals, but less is known about the influence of family on political attitudes...read more

Product Description: This book examines the state of print and electronic media in the United States of America, Europe, and China. The latest mass communication advances demonstrate that we live in an increasingly media-centric world. The chapters include theoretical and empirical studies that shed light on the meaning of this development...read more

Product Description: The proper task of the social sciences, this book argues, is to understand and control the impact of social and political institutions on human life--not to predict and control human behavior. Such a reorientation must start, in the author's view, with a rejection of the assumptions of traditional Western political thought...read more