[ecrea] New Special Section on "Qualitative Political Communication" Published

International Journal of Communication has just published its latest Special
Section on "Qualitative Political Communication" at
http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc

Where has qualitative political communication research gone?

In the 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld pursued the mixed methods fieldwork that
enabled him to develop groundbreaking theories of opinion leadership and the
two-step flow of communication. At the same time, Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang
were pioneering field studies of the first live broadcasts of political
parades and conventions, analyzing their effects on spectators and media
audiences alike. And yet, despite this body of work, in the ensuing 60 years
the study of political communication has largely come to be defined by
surveys and experiments that narrowly seek to understand the psychology of
voters.

Despite the advances quantitative methodological approaches have made for
our understanding of political attitudes and behavior, there is a widespread
uneasiness in the field that political communication research has not kept
pace with the speed and scale of changes in contemporary media, social life,
and politics.

In this Special Section on Qualitative Political Communication, we call for
a new era of qualitative research in order to theorize and describe the
changing ways that political actors use media, the new technological and
social contexts within which citizens consume and share political
information, and the ways that political organizations of all stripes are
changing in the digital era.  Guest-edited by David Karpf, Daniel Kreiss,
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Matthew Powers, this Special Section features nine
original empirical studies and methodological articles that reveal how
qualitative work can produce new objects of analysis and understandings of
political phenomenon that are close to the lived experience of political
actors and citizens themselves.

Even more, these articles demonstrate the pressing need for scholars to get
out from behind their computers and foray into a contemporary world that
looks very different from the assumptions that guided scholarship during the
mass media era.

Authors for this Special Section are:

•	Lucy Atkinson, University of Texas at Austin, USA
•	Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers, University, USA
• 	Elizabeth Dubois, University of Oxford, UK
• 	Tine Ustad Figenschou, University of Oslo, Norway
• 	Heather Ford, University of Oxford, UK
• 	Lucas Graves, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
•	Otfried Jarren, University of Zurich, UK
•	Neta Kliger-Vilenchik, University of Southern California, USA
•	Ulrike Klinger, University of Zurich, Switzerland
•	Magda Konieczna, Ursinus College, USA
•	Stephan Rösli, University of Zurich, Switzerland
•	Jen Schradie, University of Toulouse, France
•	Michael Serazio, Fairfield University, USA
•	Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, University of Oslo, Norway

Please read these papers that published June 1, 2015 at http://ijoc.org.

Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor
___________________________________________________
International Journal of Communication (IJoC)
USC Annenberg Press
University of Southern California
http://ijoc.org/



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