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Although voters are central to the processes of democracy, scholarly attention to voters, with few exceptions, is limited to statistical analysis of decision-making and opinion-formation processes, treating voters as a mass audience or audience segment. This article argues for more nuanced interpretations of voter representations in the media. Citing key studies of news media representation, the authors explore visual representation of voters in political cartoon commentary and argue that cartoons provide a view of voters that supports and supplements views evident in the news media but question the role of voter depictions in cartoons as sources of understanding about political publics. Keywords: political cartoons; audience representations; voters

This article examines research of mass communication, focusing on behavior and cognition and measurements of media experience. The author compares cross-national systems, and emphasizes that communication is defined by its function rather than whether it occurs via interpersonal channels or mass media.

This paper extends the theory of sophisticated voting to cover situations in which legislators lack complete information about both the agenda and about their colleagues' preferences. The voting on a 1986 U.S. Senate resolution to provide full-time television coverage of Senate proceedings serves as illustration of the theory, as well as adding to the stock of sophisticated voting cases found in th Our approach makes possible a further empirical and theoretical exploration of the links between voting strategy and other aspects of legislative strategy, including agenda control, persuasion, and In contrast with misgivings found in the recent literature, these connections clarify the relevance sophisticated voting and strategic agenda manipulation for the empirical analysis of legislative pol

After examining the rhetoric of the network broadcast coverage on election night 2000, it is concluded that although individual 'decision desk' call times were not identical across networks, there was a consistent pattern of correct and incorrect calls. The language of the election night broadcasts undercut network credibility on two counts. First, the networks largely failed to acknowledge their common reliance on the Voter News Service for their information, creating the impression that independent research by the five different networks was producing identical calls. Second, the networks failed to adequately describe how the calls were being made and the limitations of predictive models in a close election.

Rural Tyler County in the western hills of West Virginia lost exactly 1,000 votes belonging to Bob Dole during the 1996 presidential election. In fact, a lot of votes in [...]

With another tight presidential election right around the corner, the last thing anyone wants is a repeat of the 2000 Florida ballot fiasco--hanging chads and accusations of disenfranchised minorities. But […]

Would you want to read in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Karen Foss has not voted in the past four elections? Or that Jerry Berger has cast ballots four of [...]