Candidate Images in Presidential Elections

Since Nimmo and Savage's groundbreaking work, Candidates and Their Images (1976), there has been no book dedicated solely to the examination of political candidate images. This volume adds to the development of the candidate image construct initiated by Nimmo and Savage. It provides a compendium of state-of-the-art theory and research of candidate images and image formation in the U.S. presidential elections. The contributors to this work, among the best-known in the field of political communication, describe and explain how presidential election results hinge on voter perceptions of candidates and how candidates seek to construct images that attract the most votes. The volume integrates issues of voter decision-making, media messages, campaigning, debate effects, and political advertising into the development of political communication theory. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of political communication.

KENNETH L. HACKER is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. He holds degrees from Sonoma State University, California State University at Sacramento, and the University of Oregon. He has presented numerous papers and published articles and book chapters about political communication, with a primary focus on political images, language, and politics, and voter discourse and candidate images. His primary focus in studying candidate images is to describe and explain how voters influence each other through conversation and how that influence modifies their perceptions of candidates. He is also researching the effects of computer-mediated communication on political communication.