Gerald Sussman – författare

Global Electioneering explores American-style political consulting and its spread to countries throughout the world, emphasizing the roles of communication and technology. Gerald Sussman challenges the common belief that American influence abroad is due strictly to the professionalization of politics and asserts that it is instead affected by economics, industry, and the organizational power of new communication technology.

How do politics influence communication technology? What forces shape technological enterprise? How do politics, society, and technology intersect? To answer these questions, author Gerald Sussman looks beyond the techno-functional aspects of product and process and focuses instead on the human agents and institutions involved in the making of information technologies. Sussman begins with a look at theory and then reviews the social history of communication technology. He next examines contemporary issues in the U.S. context, from the diminishing of citizenship and work experiences to the growing use of commercial and political surveillance. In so doing, he reveals to readers "just who the heavy truckers are on the information highway and what that means for the rest of us." The author concludes by examining the global dimension of the information society, pointing out effects on developing countries and alternatives to the hegemonic tendencies of the U.S. and world economies. Through his carefully detailed and critical analysis, Sussman demystifies the political and social inner workings of communication technologies and guides readers to an understanding of the real meaning of the information revolution. Ideal as a main text or as supplement for courses in American politics, contemporary political issues, the political economy of communication, and public policy, Communication, Technology, and Politics in the Information Age will be an invaluable resource to students and academics in the fields of communication, political science, sociology, and mass communication.

This book employs a political economic approach in exploring the underlying neoliberal foundations of politics and electioneering in both the United States and the United Kingdom that have widened the divide among voters and, over time, led to a deep distrust of state institutions, including electoral politics and system of political representation.Covering the period of 1980 to the present, the book provides analysis of how neoliberalism applies to the electoral sphere and draws the connections between the larger forces behind the globalising political economy and the trajectory of the corporate state and the many intersections of US and UK electoral politics – with lessons for other wealthy states that follow in similar pathways. As such, it helps explain a phenomenal parallel pattern of major political upheavals and social dislocations within these two countries. Finally, it reveals through numerous social indicators that the two leading neoliberal political economic systems are producing depressing results for large sections of their citizenry and a threat to social democracy, as the concentration of wealth and well-being is largely captured by a minority class of empowered individuals.This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of electoral politics, political parties, political behaviour, British politics, U.S. politics and more broadly to readers interested in political economy and comparative politics.

This book employs a political economic approach in exploring the underlying neoliberal foundations of politics and electioneering in both the United States and the United Kingdom that have widened the divide among voters and, over time, led to a deep distrust of state institutions, including electoral politics and system of political representation.Covering the period of 1980 to the present, the book provides analysis of how neoliberalism applies to the electoral sphere and draws the connections between the larger forces behind the globalising political economy and the trajectory of the corporate state and the many intersections of US and UK electoral politics – with lessons for other wealthy states that follow in similar pathways. As such, it helps explain a phenomenal parallel pattern of major political upheavals and social dislocations within these two countries. Finally, it reveals through numerous social indicators that the two leading neoliberal political economic systems are producing depressing results for large sections of their citizenry and a threat to social democracy, as the concentration of wealth and well-being is largely captured by a minority class of empowered individuals.This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of electoral politics, political parties, political behaviour, British politics, U.S. politics and more broadly to readers interested in political economy and comparative politics.

Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe is a study of the uses of systemic propaganda in U.S. foreign policy. Moving beyond traditional understandings of propaganda, Branding Democracy analyzes the expanding and ubiquitous uses of domestic public persuasion under a neoliberal regime and an informational mode of development and its migration to the arena of foreign policy. A highly mobile and flexible corporate-dominated new informational economy is the foundation of intensified Western marketing and promotional culture across spatial and temporal divides, enabling transnational interests to integrate territories previously beyond their reach. U.S. «democracy promotion» and interventions in the Eastern European «color revolutions» in the early twenty-first century serve as studies of neoliberal state interests in action. Branding Democracy will be of interest to students of U.S. and European politics, political economy, foreign policy, political communication, American studies, and culture studies.

The Propaganda Society analyzes the rapid expansion of propaganda and promotional activities in the leading «post-industrial» states under the regime of neoliberalism. With the outsourcing of manufacturing, these states have converted to service, selling, and speculative economies, with a concurrent rapid growth of advertising, marketing, public relations, sales management, branding, and other promotional enterprises. Aided by digital technologies and the removal – «deregulation» – of political, legal, administrative, and moral barriers to state and corporate expansion on a global scale, a group of dominant political and commercial actors have brought about a common discourse and convergent set of practices rooted in sophisticated and unprecedented levels of propaganda and promotion. Written by leading scholars in the field, each of the eighteen chapters in this book discuss the ways in which elite uses of propaganda have radically transformed media and information systems, political and public culture, the conduct of war and foreign relations, and the overall behavior of the state.