Review Essay
Publishers & Political Communication
This appears to be a bountiful time for those of us who teach, research and write about political communication. We have thriving professional organizations, our own journal, and this report. In particular, it seems that more and more publishers are inclined to publish our manuscripts. An overview and information about who these publishers are should be of use to readers of Political Communication Report interested in seeing their work reach the public in book form. To go beyond impression and anecdote, I therefore wrote to the relevant publishers, seventy-nine in all, from Addison Wesley Longman to Yale and from the best-known to the most obscure, asking what they publish in our field.
Publishers must be inordinately occupied producing books, lack devotion to promotion, or see no profit in answering a letter from an enquiring academic. Perhaps I should have offered them a more material incentive to reply than my commitment to present the results to the several hundred members of the Political Communication sections of the APSA and ICA through our Political Communication Report. Whatever the reasons, responses were few.
What follows, then, is based on my own knowledge and the material I did receive from publishers. Apologies in advance for the inevitable omissions and errors which, no doubt, will be so egregious as to justify outraged (outrageous) communications to the editor.
Books on political communication can be published in an entire series devoted to the topic (broadly defined), as part of a series on a more general subject (e.g. American government and politics), on a non-series basis, as texts, or in some combination of these categories. I'll cover the publishers under each rubric. I considered dividing the books into scholarly and classroom-professional but in today's publishing market this distinction often seems unclear, if not increasingly obsolete.
Entire Series
There are currently five main publishers of series on political communication. Praeger (Greenwood) has been at it the longest under the editorship of Robert Denton, Jr. Hampton Press inaugurated its series in the early 1990s under my auspices, has published more than twenty titles, and is adding a series on the media and elections in comparative perspective. Susan Herbst and Benjamin Page edit a series for the University of Chicago Press. With Lance Bennett and Robert Entman as its editors, Cambridge University Press recently entered the field; as have Bruce Gronbeck and Lynda Lee Kaid for Peter Lang publishers.
Part of a Series
Lawrence Erlbaum puts out a major series, Communication, edited by Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann. Its political communication books have developed out of the publisher's subseries on Journalism and on Mass Communication. Sage publishes a wide range of books under Communication, including ones on political communication. In two series, one on Communication & Media Studies and another on Communication and Culture, Transaction Publishers also includes books related to political communication, as does Rowman & Littlefield in its series on Critical Media Studies.
Non-Series
Many publishers issue books related to political communication. Some do so often (Oxford University Press), others rarely (University Press of Kansas). University presses are prominent, including those at Columbia, California, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Princeton, SUNY, Yale, and the academic publisher Brookings. For example, in addition to books on the politics of communication policy, the MIT Press publishes books in political and social theory that have implications for political communication.
Commercial houses who publish works on political communication include Blackwell, CQ Press, Chatham House, the Free Press, JAI Press/Ablex, Nelson Hall, Norton, Oxford University Press, Random House, Lynne Rienner, Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield, St. Martin's, M.E. Sharpe, Simon and Schuster, and Westview.
Texts
As courses on political communication and related topics proliferate, commercial publishers have recognized the desirability of including political communication texts on their lists. CQ Press was the forerunner with Doris Graber's Mass Media and American Politics and its companion reader. Other texts are published by Allyn and Bacon (Woodward), Erlbaum (Perloff), Macmillan (Ansolabehere, Behr, and Iyengar), Peacock (Yeric), Praeger (Denton and Woodward), Prentice Hall (books by Davis and also Kahan), Sage (Iyengar and Reeves), Wadsworth (Alger), and Westview (Kerbel). Longman publishes my text and one by Bennett.
Several of the publishers who have not yet issued texts in this area would no doubt be agreeable to hearing from potential authors.
Conclusion
Considerable interest exists among publishers in publishing books about political communication. Several intend to produce more books in this area. One concern, however, is that many books in our field receive few if any reviews, let alone the thoughtful ones they deserve, after they are published. Reviews depend on the interests (whims) of book review editors at political science journals such as the American Political Science Review, communication journals such as the Journal of Communication, and the like. No wonder, publisher Lynne Rienner observes, "a lot of people would be happy if Political Communication started carrying book reviews."
–David
L. Paletz
Political Science Department
Duke University