
Experts, Activists, and Democratic Politics: Are Electorates Self-Educating? by T. K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, & 1 more
ISBN: 9781107068872
Cambridge University Press, 17 November 2014
Hardcover, 300 pages
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.