Experts, Activists, and Democratic Politics : Are Electorates Self-Educating?

This book addresses opinion leadership in democratic politics as a process whereby individuals send and receive information through their informally based networks of political communication. The analyses are based on a series of small group experiments, conducted by the authors, which build on accumulated evidence from more than seventy years of survey data regarding political communication among interdependent actors. The various experimental designs provide an opportunity to assess the nature of the communication process, both in terms of increasing citizen expertise as well as in terms of communicating political biases.

T. K. Ahn is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seoul National University. His work has been published in a number of journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, and the Journal of Economy Psychology. He has received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award from the American Political Science Association for the best paper on political communication. He received his PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Robert Huckfeldt is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. He is the author or co-author of Politics in Context; Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics; Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication (Cambridge, 1995); Political Disagreement (Cambridge, 2004); Experts, Activists, and Interdependent Citizens; and a number of articles. He received the 1979 E. E. Schattschneider Award for outstanding dissertation in American politics from the American Political Science Association; the 2012 Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award from the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association; and outstanding conference-paper awards from the Political Communication Section and the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Section of the American Political Science Association. He received his PhD from Washington University, St Louis.

John Barry Ryan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Florida State University. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, and Political Communication. He has received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award from the American Political Science Association for the best paper on political communication. He received his PhD from the University of California, Davis.