TY - JOUR
AU - SHAPIRO, ROBERT Y.
AB -  Important research on the “public presidency” has been concerned with the extent to which and under what conditions American presidents respond to or lead (or manipulate) public opinion. This book is a useful addition to the recent ranks on this work, which include George Edwards’s On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit, Dan Wood’s The Myth of Presidential Representation, and Jeffrey Cohen’s Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age. Nicely framed and organized (though occasionally repetitive), the book is aptly predicated on the assumption that in order to garner public support for their policy initiatives, presidents must first break through the noise of information and debate in the mass media and capture enough of the public’s attention to specific issues on the president’s policy agenda to have a fighting chance at persuasion. We know from social psychology that without exposure to new information, attitudes and opinions cannot 482 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY be (re)directed. The authors emphasize this initial agenda-setting stage as a crucial first step in policymaking; it is important in determining what issues might be most important—primed—in the electorate’s voting decisions; and given that it is difficult to find persuasion effects (as it 
TI - Breaking Through the Noise: Presidential Leadership, Public Opinion, and the News Media by Matthew Eshbaugh‐Soha and Jeffey S. Peake
JO - Political Science Quarterly
DO - 10.1002/j.1538-165x.2012.tb02283.x
DA - 2012-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/breaking-through-the-noise-presidential-leadership-public-opinion-and-clN8RYo3Ff
SP - 481
VL - 127
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -