Victoria A. Farrar-Myers – författare

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates' approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens' engagement with the issues—these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion? In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship—an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates' approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens' engagement with the issues—these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion? In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today's diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship—an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.

Without a doubt, the institution of the presidency today is quite different from the one that existed throughout the early part of the nation’s history, despite only minimal revisions to its formal constitutional structure. The processes by which the institution of the presidency has developed have remained largely unexamined, however. Victoria A. Farrar-Myers offers a carefully crafted argument about how changes in presidential authority transform the institution. Her analysis tracks interactions between the president and Congress during the years 1881–1920 in three policy areas: the commitment of troops, the creation of administrative agencies, and the adoption of tariff policy. Farrar-Myers shows that Congress and the president have in fact “created a coordinated script that provides the basis of precedent for future interactions under similar circumstances.” Changes in presidential authority, she argues, “are the residual of everyday actions,” which create new shared understandings of expected behavior. As these understandings are reinforced over time, they become interwoven into the institution of the presidency itself. Farrar-Myers’s analysis will offer theoretical guidance for political scientists’ understanding of the development of presidential authority and the processes that drive the institutionalization of the presidency, and will provide historians with a nuanced understanding of the institution from the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Progressive era.