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Information is not taken seriously. Much is said about the information age, the information economy, the information society, and particularly about information technology, but little about information itself. Information has some very odd characteristics, conveniently overlooked by senior managers passionate about knowledge-based, learning organizations; by politicians and public servants, compensating with policy and programme for the information failure of organization and market; and by the IT and dotcom communities, bent on adding value to what they treat as just a commodity. This book looks at innovation from an information perspective; one that puts information first. Its information perspective is applied to eighteenth-century agriculture and high technology, to technology transfer and espionage, to corporate strategy and intellectual property.

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies—most famously, about turnout. The rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This book provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors—politicians as well as voters—are only boundedly rational. The theory posits learning via trial and error: actions that surpass an actor’s aspiration level are more likely to be used in the future, while those that fall short are less likely to be tried later. Based on this idea of adaptation, the book constructs formal models of party competition, turnout, and voters’ choices of candidates. These models predict substantial turnout levels, voters sorting into parties, and winning parties adopting centrist platforms. In multiparty elections, voters are able to coordinate vote choices on majority-preferred candidates, while all candidates garner significant vote shares. Overall, the behavioral theory and its models produce macroimplications consistent with the data on elections, and they use plausible microassumptions about the cognitive capacities of politicians and voters. A computational model accompanies the book and can be used as a tool for further research.

Why are Americans governed by the rich? Millionaires make up only three percent of the public but control all three branches of the federal government. How did this happen? What stops lower-income and working-class Americans from becoming politicians? This book is a compelling and comprehensive account of why so few working-class people hold office—and what reformers can do about it. It debunks popular misconceptions (like the idea that workers are unelectable or unqualified to govern), identifies the factors that keep lower-class Americans off the ballot and out of political institutions, and evaluates a variety of reform proposals. The book shows that in the United States elections have a built-in “cash ceiling,” a series of structural barriers that make it almost impossible for the working-class to run for public office. Elections take a serious toll on candidates, many working-class Americans simply cannot shoulder the practical burdens, and civic and political leaders often pass them over in favor of white-collar candidates. But these obstacles are not inevitable. Pilot programs to recruit, train, and support working-class candidates have the potential to increase the economic diversity of our governing institutions and ultimately amplify the voices of ordinary citizens. Who runs for office goes to the heart of whether the USA has a democracy that is representative or not. The book shows that the best hope for combating the oversized political influence of the rich might simply be to help more working-class Americans become politicians.

Americans are disgusted with watching politicians screaming and yelling at one another on television. But does all the noise really make a difference? Drawing on numerous studies, this book provides the first comprehensive look at the consequences of in-your-face politics. The book contradicts the conventional wisdom by documenting both the benefits and the drawbacks of in-your-face media. “In-your-face” politics refers to both the level of incivility and the up-close and personal way that we experience political conflict on television. Just as actual physical closeness intensifies people's emotional reactions to others, the appearance of closeness on a video screen has similar effects. We tend to keep our distance from those with whom we disagree. Modern media, however, puts those we dislike in our faces in a way that intensifies our negative reactions. This book finds that incivility is particularly detrimental to facilitating respect for oppositional political viewpoints and to citizens' levels of trust in politicians and the political process. On the positive side, incivility and close-up camera perspectives contribute to making politics more physiologically arousing and entertaining to viewers. This encourages more attention to political programs, stimulates recall of the content, and encourages people to relay content to others. In the end, this book demonstrates why political incivility is not easily dismissed as a disservice to democracy—it may even be a necessity in an age with so much competition for citizens' attention.

Party competition for votes in free and fair elections involves complex interactions by multiple actors in political landscapes that are continuously evolving, yet classical theoretical approaches to the subject leave many important questions unanswered. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of party competition using the computational techniques of agent-based modeling. This exciting new technology enables researchers to model competition between several different political parties for the support of voters with widely varying preferences on many different issues. The book models party competition as a true dynamic process in which political parties rise and fall, a process where different politicians attack the same political problem in very different ways, and where today's political actors, lacking perfect information about the potential consequences of their choices, must constantly adapt their behavior to yesterday's political outcomes. This book shows how agent-based modeling can be used to accurately reflect how political systems really work. It demonstrates that politicians who are satisfied with relatively modest vote shares often do better at winning votes than rivals who search ceaselessly for higher shares of the vote. It reveals that politicians who pay close attention to their personal preferences when setting party policy often have more success than opponents who focus solely on the preferences of voters, that some politicians have idiosyncratic “valence” advantages that enhance their electability—and much more.

Covering more than four decades of American social and political history, this book examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan's presidential ascent in 1980. Their unique stories reveal African Americans fighting for an alternative economic and civil rights movement—even as the Republican Party appeared increasingly hostile to that very idea. Black party members attempted to influence the direction of conservatism—not to destroy it, but rather to expand the ideology to include black needs and interests. As racial minorities in their political party and as political minorities within their community, black Republicans occupied an irreconcilable position—they were shunned by African American communities and subordinated by the Grand Old Party (GOP). In response, black Republicans vocally, and at times viciously, critiqued members of their race and party, in an effort to shape the attitudes and public images of black citizens and the GOP. Moving beyond traditional liberalism and conservatism, black Republicans sought to address African American racial experiences in a distinctly Republican way. This book provides a new understanding of the interaction between African Americans and the Republican Party, and the seemingly incongruous intersection of civil rights and American conservatism.