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Political Communication Program Faculty:

Political Science:

Barry Burden, Professor of Political Science, bases his research and teaching in American politics, with an emphasis on electoral politics and representation. He has written about partisanship, third party campaigns, public attitudes toward political leaders, congressional politics, candidate strategies, and voter turnout. He is co-author of Why Americans Split Their Tickets: Campaigns, Competition, and Divided Government, editor of Uncertainty in American Politics, and author of a forthcoming book titled Personal Roots of Representation. Burden has also published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, and Electoral Studies.

Charles Franklin, Professor of Political Science, specializes in the analysis of campaigns and elections using sophisticated statistical methods. His current research focuses on the accuracy of polling and the impact of campaign events and advertising on vote choice. Franklin is an election night consultant and statistical analyst for ABC News. He is past president of the Society for Political Methodology and a current or past governing board member of numerous academic organizations, including the National Election Study, The Oxford University Spring School in Quantitative Methods and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. His articles on partisanship, public opinion and the Supreme Court and U.S. Senate elections have appeared in a number of major journals.

Ken Goldstein, Professor of Political Science, focuses his research on the use and effectiveness of paid media (chiefly television advertising) and free media (local news) during campaigns. He is also director of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and the University of Wisconsin NewsLab. The Wisconsin Advertising Project has tracked political advertising since 1996 with a focus on national campaign spending and on key political races where outcomes were influenced by advertising spending by candidates, political parties, and third-party organizations. The Wisconsin NewsLab compiled information about local news coverage of politics by capturing and analyzing a representative national sample of tens of thousands of local news broadcasts aired during the 2002 and 2004 general elections. The NewsLab is set to track coverage again in 2006. He has published one book and has another forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and has placed his work in major political science journals.

Virginia Sapiro, Sophonisba P. Breckinridge Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies, has done teaching and research on political action, including individual and collective acts of political communication; the political psychology of political communication; gender politics; symbolic politics, and media and politics. She is a former director of the American National Election Studies and past president of the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her more recent scholarly works are papers and articles on political socialization; gender and social capital; the gender basis of political psychology and public opinion; variation in the public interpretation of political events and object; gender and campaign advertising; and information seeking as political action.

Katherine Cramer Walsh, Associate Professor of Political Science, studies civic engagement, political conversation and civic deliberation. She is the author of Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (Chicago, 2004), which studied informal political conversation through a novel use of participant observation. She was also part of the recent American Political Science Association Task Force on Civic Engagement and Civic Engagement which published a comprehensive review of the role of policy initiatives such as civic deliberation programs in fostering and enhancing civic engagement (Democracy at Risk: Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship, and What We Can Do About It, Brookings, 2005). Her forthcoming book, A Practical Politics of Difference: Race, Community and Dialogue in Civic Life, used a combination of participant observation and large-N analyses to examine the use of civic dialogue to address race relations (Chicago).

Journalism and Mass Communication:

Lewis A. Friedland, in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Department of Sociology, directs the Center for Communication and Democracy. He teaches and conducts research on theory of the public sphere and civil society, community structure and civic life, media ecologies, the impact of new communication technology on society and community, public media and public journalism, and qualitative and social network methods. He is author with Carmen Sirianni of The Civic Renewal Movement (Kettering Foundation Press, 2005) and Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal (University of California Press, 2001). He is co-founder of the Civic Practices Network (www.cpn.org), the first major website on civic renewal, established in 1994, and is author of more than 30 monographs, book chapters, and articles. Friedland is current studying these issues in the contexts of Madison, Wisconsin and New York City.

Douglas McLeod, Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication, has developed two lines of inquiry into the antecedents and consequences of mass communication: 1) social conflicts and the mass media; and 2) media content, public opinion and knowledge. The first program of research focuses on the role of the media in both domestic and international conflicts, including media coverage of social protest and its impact on the audience. McLeod’s second line of research studies several factors shaping the information content of mass media and its consequent outcomes on public opinion and knowledge, including research on framing and priming effects. He is currently working on a book looking at how news framing of the USA Patriot Act influences audience assessments of issues related to national security and civil liberties. He has published 37 journal articles in leading communication journals, as well as authoring 14 book chapters and co-editing a book on key communication concepts.

Dietram A. Scheufele, Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication and the Department of Life Sciences Communication, specializes in two areas. The first area is media influences on political participation and civic engagement. Scheufele is especially interested in how deliberative exchanges among citizens and the nature of their social networks can moderate or strengthen these effects. As a member of the Communication Technologies Research Cluster at UW, much of his work in this area also focuses on the role that the Internet can play in promoting or undermining civic engagement. Scheufele’s second specialization is public opinion and public opinion polling. His recent research in this area has examined the factors shaping policy stances and attitudes toward science and technology. Scheufele’s work has been supported by a number of funding agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation, and published in leading political communication journals.

Dhavan V. Shah, Louis A. & Mary E. Maier-Bascom Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication and Political Science, focuses on the social psychology of political communication. His research concerns (a) the influence of news framing on political cognitions, social judgment, and public opinion, and (b) the capacity of mass media, particularly the Internet, to encourage civic and political engagement. His current work on framing has been conducted as part of a series of online survey experiments with students and faculty in the Mass Communications Research Center. His research on media and civic life is concentrated on two multi-wave national panel studies built around the 2000 and 2004 elections that consider the effects of traditional and digital media use within campaign advertising environments. He has authored articles in leading communication and political science journals and served as principal investigator on grants from PBS, CPB, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Carnegie, Pew, Ford, Russell Sage, and the Journal Foundations.

Communication Arts:

Robert Asen, Associate Professor of Communication Arts, concentrates his research on public policy debate and theories of deliberation and the public sphere. He is especially interested in the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities and public deliberation, namely, how such inequalities may exclude some citizens from debating public issues and how these citizens seek to overcome such exclusions. He is the author of Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination and the coeditor of Counterpublics and the State. He is presently completing a volume on debates over Social Security titled Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates. His scholarly articles have appeared in various national and international journals.

Zhongdang Pan, Professor of Communication Arts, focuses on (1) news media influences in public's opinion formation and (2) China' s news media reform and its consequences. In the first area, he has examined issues such as news framing, priming effects of the news media, media impact on public's policy reasoning, and public's engagement in political talk. In the second area, he has studied the changing journalistic practices and norms, as well as media influences on civic attitudes in China. His research has been published in major communication journals and in two co-authored monographs. His current research examines cognitive fallacies in people's judgments on media influence and their consequences in civic and deliberative participation.

Michael Xenos, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, examines the effects of the context and content of political communication on the quality of democratic deliberation, public opinion, and civic engagement. He is particularly interested in how different aspects of the political information environments surrounding campaigns and elections relate to the processes by which citizens arrive at voting decisions, and also has interests in political communication and public sphere processes outside of the electoral setting. Some of his recent projects have explored how factors such as campaign intensity, negative campaigning, new communication technologies, and new sources of political information like late-night comedy, enable or constrain democratic citizenship.

Life Sciences Communication:

Albert C. Gunther, Professor of Life Sciences Communication, studies several areas related to the mass media audience. One of these, the hostile media effect, concerns partisans’ perceptual biases in processing news content. Another, the influence-of-presumed-influence hypothesis, focuses on audience perceptions of media influence on others and the consequences of those perceptions. Gunther also works on media coverage of public health issues. Much of Gunther’s research is set in the context of science- and health-related controversies, such as adolescent tobacco use, genetically modified foods and the use of primates in lab research. He publishes regularly in major communication journals and his research is funded by the NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, USDA and other sources.

Hernando Rojas, Assistant Professor of Life Sciences Communication, studies how mass media and political conversations result in political attitudes and behaviors, paying particular attention to new technologies and societies in conflict. Ongoing research projects include: (a) the study of communicative rationality in the context of societies experiencing crises of action coordination (The first of a series of international studies collecting survey data at the national level is underway in Colombia, in the context of their 2006 general elections); (b) an assessment of emerging online journalism practices under the rubric of citizen journalism both in the US and abroad. His teaching revolves around the political and societal consequences of new communication technologies.