Political Persuasion: The Use of Values in Communication

Values are fundamental to political attitudes. Ideals like freedom, equality, democracy, and fairness give us standards to judge whether conditions are good or bad and whether policy solutions are preferable or detrimental. Political Persuasion examines how partisan communicators recruit social and political values to persuade the public to support their positions on controversial issues, making it one weapon in the arsenal that communicators and political entrepreneurs deploy to shape public opinion.

In this book, Thomas E. Nelson explores the different strategies and tactics constituting value recruitment and examines how communicators respond to the value recruitment efforts of their opponents. Drawing primarily from two cases in modern American politics, Nelson presents interviews with activists and policymakers to understand the values at stake and the tactics in play, and provides evidence from experiments that examine how value recruitment shapes our opinions. Through this analysis, readers will gain greater recognition and understanding of value recruitment, which in turn will deepen our knowledge about the dynamics of political debate and public attitudes.