Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan
Book cover

How Political Actors Use the Media

A Functional Analysis of the Media’s Role in Politics

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

  • Goes beyond the US dominance in this field, to present data from more than 10 Western Democracies, including the US, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Canada and Israel

  • Contains some of the most influential and visible scholars in the field of media and politics both in Europe as in the US

  • Uses a wide variety of rich datasets, including interviews with leading politicians and journalists in multiple countries, and a variety of research methods, ranging from in-depth case studies to experimental designs

  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (14 chapters)

  1. Conceptualizing Media Influence in Politics

  2. The Media as a Source of Information

  3. The Media as a Political Arena

Keywords

About this book

This book investigates how individual politicians and political parties strategically make use of the media to reach their political goals. Looking beyond a purely Americentric viewpoint, the chapters present data from more than ten Western democracies to argue that the media are both a source of information and an arena for political communication. This double functional role of the media is examined from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, including chapters dealing with different aspects of politics - from campaigning to law making - and within different political contexts. The role of the news media is discussed from the perspective of the political actor, focusing on both the opportunities and the constraints the news media provide, resulting in a multidisciplinary text that will appeal to students and scholars of both communication and political science.  

Reviews

“How Political Actors Use the Media’ is a unique and coherent collection of well written chapters focusing on a very important topic. The eminent list of editors and contributors are among the best scholars worldwide on this topic. Centred around four core questions on the relationship between media and politics, the chapters address different sub-questions, using different methods, and provide evidence from a range of countries. The editors’ mission, to show that the media have a double function for political actors, being both a source of information and an arena that they need to access, is forcefully accomplished! This book is likely to set an agenda for further research in this area and become the key reference point for such future work.” (Claes de Vreese, University of Amsterdam)

“This book offers a rich exploration of how politicians use the news media. A common ‘information and arena’ framework provides a degree of focus that is rare in edited volumes. The result is a rich set of ideas about how to understand the media arena and its role in politics.” (Lance Bennett, University of Washington)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Peter Van Aelst, Stefaan Walgrave

About the editors

Peter Van Aelst and Stefaan Walgrave are professors in political science at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and leading members of the research group ‘Media, Movements and Politics’(www.M2P.be). They have published widely on the relationship between media an d politics and the agenda-setting role of the media. 




Bibliographic Information

Publish with us