Experts, Activists, and Democratic Politics

Are Electorates Self-Educating?

T. K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, John Barry Ryan

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781107068872
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316164501
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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. The various experimental designs provide an opportunity to assess the nature of the communication process, both in terms of increasing citizen expertise as well as in terms of communicating political biases.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Origins and acknowledgments
• 1 Experts, activists, and self-educating electorates
• 2 The imperatives of interdependence
• 3 Experts, activists, and the social communication of political expertise
• 4 Unanimity, discord, and opportunities for opinion leadership
• 5 Informational asymmetries among voters
• 6 Expertise and bias in political communication networks
• 7 Interdependence, communication, and calculation Costs, benefits, and opinion leadership
• 8 Partisanship and the efficacy of social communication in constrained environments
• 9 Noise, bias, and expertise: the dynamics of becoming informed
• 10 The complex dynamics of political communication
• 11 Experts, activists, and democratic prospects
• References
• Index of key concepts and authors