Manipulating Democracy: Democratic Theory, Political Psychology, and Mass Media »

Wayne Le Cheminant is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. He is co-editor of the volume Mormons and Politics: The Lessons of History, Belief, and Practice.

John M. Parrish is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Paradoxes of Political Ethics: From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand.

Manipulation is a source of pervasive anxiety in contemporary American politics. Observers charge that manipulative practices in political advertising, media coverage, and public discourse have helped to produce an increasingly polarized political arena, an uninformed and apathetic electorate, election campaigns that exploit public fears and prejudices, a media that titillates rather than educates, and a policy process that too often focuses on the symbolic rather than substantive.

Manipulating Democracy offers the first comprehensive dialogue between empirical political scientists and normative theorists on the definition and contemporary practice of democratic manipulation. This impressive array of distinguished scholars—political scientists, philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and communications scholars—collectively draw out the connections between competing definitions of manipulation, the psychology of manipulation, and the political institutions and practices through which manipulation is seen to produce a tightly-knit exploration of an issue at the heart of democratic politics.

Introduction: Manipulating Democracy: A Reappraisal (Wayne Le Cheminant and John M. Parrish) Part One: Democratic Theory 1. Manipulation and Democratic Theory (James Fishkin) 2. Manipulation: As Old As Democracy Itself (and Sometimes Dangerous) (Terence Ball) 3. When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative: Disentangling Persuasion and Manipulation (Nathaniel Klemp) Part Two: Political Psychology 4. Changing Brains: Lessons from the Living Wage Campaign (George Lakoff) 5. Emotional Manipulation of Political Identity (Rose McDermott) 6. Mimesis, Persuasion, and Manipulation in Plato’s Republic (Christina Tarnopolsky) Part Three: Mass Media 7. "News You Can’t Use": Politics and Democracy in the New Media Environment (Richard Fox and Amy Gangl) 8. The Betrayal of Democracy: The Purpose of Public Opinion Survey Research and Its Misuse by Presidents (Lawrence Jacobs) 9. The Political Economy of Mass Media: Implications for Informed Citizenship (Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn) 10. Exploiting the Clueless: Heresthetic, Overload, and Rational Ignorance (Andrew Sabl)